The Darling

~ ~ ~

THE DREAMER THAT my records called Number 34, when finally I was able to put a face on the number, was the first one I named. After a few months at the lab I had taken to visiting the chimp house when no one was around, mid-afternoon, when the chimps, having been recently fed by Benji, were usually relatively quiet and settled. I went there for company, strangely enough. My days were lonely, and somehow visiting the chimp house after the humans had left it diluted my loneliness. The animals were kept one to a cage, the babies housed by themselves in smaller, half-size cages. The cages were padlocked, constructed of thick steel bars that might have come from a maximum-security prison, and stacked on metal racks. For ease of cleaning, the floor of each cage was grated to allow feces and urine and uneaten food to fall through, the way chickens are kept in poultry farms. I’d gotten used to the rotting, vegetal smell of the place, the claustrophobic heat, and the sorrow that the creatures exuded with every breath. But something about that sorrow drew me forward and out of my habitual, brittle self-absorption. Paradoxically and without a scrap of shame, I felt comforted by their sorrow, soothed and reassured by it. Theirs was a reality greater than mine.

I walked alongside the cages and peered in, and the chimps came cautiously forward, and for a second, with knuckled hands grasping the inch-thick bars, their round, puckered faces peered back at me. Some of them rolled up their lips and bared their huge mouths to warn me off; others, lips pursed, on the edge of speech, it seemed, ready to exchange a small word or two, saw me approach and shyly withdrew and became sullen or sour faced; and there were a few who were clearly psychotic, screaming, wild eyed, terrorized.

Number 34 was a large adult male, and I kept coming back to his cage and lingering in front of it, perhaps because after my first few visits, he, more than the rest, was able to return my gaze with the same mixture and degree of apparent curiosity and fear that I was feeling towards him, and he seemed neither enraged by my presence nor intimidated by it. The others, when I looked directly at them, if they came towards me at all, if they did not cower in the corner of their cages or, like autistic children, bang their heads against the bars, leapt at me or bared their teeth in rage or spat. They tried to throw things at me, uneaten food, feces, water bowls, and sent me on my way, frightened and disturbed and embarrassed.

This was before I learned how to approach the chimps — eyes lowered, teeth covered, face slightly canted, as if in deference. It was Number 34 who taught me. From the first, he’d been neither angered by my presence before his cage nor frightened of it. With him, I had a chance to experiment, mimicking his approach to me and afterwards applying it to the others, who gradually began to accept my approach, then, over time, seemed to welcome it. Hello, brother ape. Greetings, sister ape. How are you today? What are your thoughts, brother ape? Is everyone in the chimp house okay? No one sick? No one injured?

I looked steadily at Number 34, and he looked steadily back. He was the boss, I decided, the chief. That’s why he’s given me the time of day and hasn’t been frightened or angered by my dumb lack of ceremony. He’s seen that I’m just an ignorant human, and because I’m not Benji or Elizabeth and haven’t been involved in the capture and transport and imprisonment of him or any of the others, I’m relatively harmless. He was long faced, with a grizzled muzzle and a huge paunch and a habit of pouting with his lips as if about to whistle. His facial expression reminded me somehow of a surgeon, scalpel poised, ready to cut — thoughtful, concentrated, deliberate. I named him Doc.

I suspected that Elizabeth and even Benji had favorites among the chimps and might even have given some of them names. But I told no one about Doc, and gradually over the following weeks I named them all, one by one, even the babies. There was Ginko, a scrawny adolescent male who had a pale, greenish cast to his skin; and Mano, a stubby, tough-looking male whose full name I realized later must be Mano-a-Mano; and Wassail, round bellied and freckled and reminding me of Christmas somehow, one of Santa’s elves; and Edna, a slope-shouldered female with dark, stringy hair who made me remember for the first time in years a crafts counselor I’d had at Camp Saranac the summer I was nine, a kindly woman mocked by all her charges, including me, for her slow speech and low, mannish voice. Their names bubbled into my head as if sent by thought-transference from the chimps themselves, and it was only later that I’d realize I was naming them after people whom the chimps reminded me of, people I’d long forgotten. The names were sounds that for mysterious reasons I liked saying to myself, sounds that were keys capable of unlocking blocked memories, lost sensations, ignored associations.

Words replaced the old file numbers, absorbing the data that made up each chimp’s biography, and just as with a family member or a close friend, the name became the same as the bearer. I knew that I was making a mistake and soon would no longer be able to see the chimps as numbers, as data, and that in time I would want to free them from their cages. But I couldn’t help myself. For my job had lost its tedium, and the edge of despair had begun slowly turning into a cause. An old pattern. It’s how since childhood I have made my daily life worth living, by turning tedium and despair into a cause.

In any case, by the time Woodrow and I were married, I had come to love my job.

“BUT WHO’S GOING to replace me?” I asked him. It was the very first morning after we’d returned from our two-day honeymoon. We were finishing breakfast on the terrace adjacent to our bedroom, and Woodrow had informed me that I might prefer to stay home today, since I no longer had to work. I would not have to give notice that I was quitting; he’d already done that for me. Jeannine refilled my coffee cup and padded barefoot back through our bedroom to the kitchen.

“Not your problem who’ll replace you, Hannah. The woman, Elizabeth, she can fill in for you until the Americans send someone over. They know about the need, I’ve already informed them that you will have to be replaced. They tell me they have some big, rich foundation ready to expand funding for the position, so they can afford to send an American graduate student over soon, which is nice and what they prefer anyhow. One of their own. The new person should be along shortly. A matter of weeks. Maybe days. So you needn’t concern yourself. Nothing will be lost in your absence, my dear.”

“Terrific. Great. Elizabeth is barely literate,” I said. “She’ll screw everything up. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get those records straight and reliable when I first took over, after she’d been ‘filling in’ for the previous clerk of the works? It took months!”

“Hannah darling, they’re chimpanzees. Animals. Animals and numbers, that’s all. Anyhow, what does it matter?” He touched the corners of his mouth with his napkin and stood up to leave. “It’s just a way to keep money flowing from one hand to the other.”

“No, it’s science! Medical science.”

Woodrow looked down at me as if I were a child, and laughed, genuinely amused. “I’ll see you this evening, my dear little bride,” he said, and strolled to his waiting car.

Woodrow was right — the lab was a shabby, inept operation, and it was ridiculous to call it a “lab” and think of the work done there as science, much less medical science. It was the broken-down tail end of an elaborate scam, a way for a pharmaceutical company to gather data that would back up its claims for a product; a way for a university to get funding for professors’ and graduate students’ salaries and brand-new lab equipment, possibly a whole new university department; a way for Woodrow’s underfunded ministry to get a few American health workers and some decent medical equipment into Liberia and paid for by someone else. And it had been a way for me to finance my stay in Africa, avoiding arrest in the U.S., and most important, a way for me to come up from underground.

Everything in Liberia worked like this. No one in the country gave a damn if a system or an organization didn’t work; no one cared if roads financed by U.S. aid weren’t built or buildings never finished or machinery, trucks, buses, and cars never repaired — as long as the money to build, finish, and repair kept moving from one hand to the other. The country was a money-changing station. Corruption at the top trickled all the way down to the bottom.

AND SO BEGAN the period when my life made no sense to me. I stayed home and shopped and cooked with Jeannine and supervised her care of my sons, the care of my house, even the care of my husband, and did little else, and acted as though it were normal, even desirable, to live this way. Time passed quickly, as it does when you don’t question the role you’re playing, when you’re barely even aware of it as a role. Everything and everyone else fits — the script is written, all the other actors know their cues and lines and where to stand, and the play continues without intermission or interruption day in and out, twenty-four hours a day, season after season, year after year, until you don’t even know you’re in a play.

All the while, however, the larger world of Liberia was following a different script. I was little aware of it — oh, I listened to the news, the gossip and rumors, Woodrow’s nightly reports, heated discussions among our friends. But because I was not a Liberian myself, I listened as if they were talking about events in a distant land. Instead, I let myself be caught up in the solidly quotidian details of the daily life of a genteel Americo wife and mother — living like my mother in the fifties and sixties, who, until her daughter managed to get herself onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list, went sweetly and quietly and cooperatively about her proper business — clipping flowers for the table; making lists and menus for the cook, guest lists for parties, travel arrangements for her husband; shopping for curtains, clothing for her children; making doctors’ and dentists’ appointments for her children; enrolling them in uplifting and socially advancing classes.

But there was so much else that I could and should have been doing with my life then that it embarrasses and hurts me to be telling it now. For this I do feel guilt, and not mere embarrassment. What was I thinking? A woman in her mid-thirties, out from under the shadow of her parents at last, no longer underground or on the run, I was free to float, moved only by the current of my real character. And my character had led me into this quiet eddy of nearly stilled, slowly circling water. I’d washed up in a small, backward, provincial country in Africa, where I was a privileged member of the elite, not merely an expatriate or a foreign national employed by her government or by some huge American or European corporation, like all the other white people here. Distinct from the other whites in spite of my skin color, I was rather grandly financed by a man who held a high government position. I had three small children to keep me distracted and more or less busy, a handful of practically indentured servants to leave me time for naps and leisurely walks in my garden, a ready-made social circle of men like my husband and women whose roles matched mine, except for the fact that they were all native Liberians and preferred to keep relations with me, the unavoidable outsider, superficial and strictly social. I was neither one thing nor the other, neither expat nor Liberian national, and thus had no responsibilities to anyone but myself, my children, and my husband, who essentially made no more strenuous demands on me than a small den of Cub Scouts might make on their den mother.

And everyone wanted me to stay exactly where I was. You’re beautiful, Hannah darling, don’t ever change. Stay in your box. Woodrow liked boxes. He liked keeping his colleagues, his friends, his sons, me, and his people all in separate compartments, one stacked upon the other, like the cages that held the chimps. His life at home, his work at the ministry, and his political and associated social lives were one stack of boxes, which he kept in the city. A second stack he stashed in the bush, in Fuama, where, for all I knew, he had a second or even a third wife in a box and had other children, though he certainly never mentioned that possibility, and I did not ask. Nor was I at all clear as to where the box with me inside was positioned, other than in the city stack. Somewhere near the middle, probably, once we were married. That box, unbeknownst to me, was slipping gradually towards the bottom.

The Liberians we saw socially in Monrovia preferred to position me at the polite edge of their circle, men and women alike, which was understandable, given my ignorance of their deeper ways and experiences and our vast differences of background, and which was how I preferred it myself. It made it easier for me to keep track of who I really was, to keep my several not-quite-serial identities from overlapping or becoming confused with one another — Hannah Musgrave, Dawn Carrington, Hannah Darling, Mammi, Miz Sundiata, each with her own past, present, and, presumably, future. Since childhood, compartmentalizing had been one of my strengths, after all. That and numbers. Like Woodrow, perhaps. Not boxes inside of boxes, or in a vertical stack like his, but rather side by side, boxes next to boxes, a row of them stretching from one horizon of my awareness to the other. And I could slip unseen from one to the next, as if each had a secret doorway connected to the box beside it.

When I look back now, so many years later, an old lady sitting on her porch here in Keene Valley or sipping her beer at the Ausable Inn or out on the lawn in the shade of a maple tree, telling my story to a friend and remembering the world I lived in then, I know what I could and should have been doing with my time and riches and my abundant privileges. I was surrounded daily, after all, by abject poverty so pervasive and deeply embedded that, though I could never have alleviated it in the slightest, I could have altered significantly the lives of at least a few individuals, people to whom I was related by marriage, for instance, and people who worked for us, and even neighbors, for, although we lived in one of the poshest neighborhoods of Monrovia, there were huts and tiny, sweltering, tin-roofed cabins tucked into the warren of back alleys nearby that housed whole families just barely scraping by and always on the verge of starvation. But even within that small circle of desperately needy family members, friends, and neighbors, I provided no meaningful, lasting help. Whether the poverty inside that circle was truly unalterable, like that of the rest of the country, I couldn’t say even today, but it seemed to me then a fixed and hopelessly unfixable condition, as permanent and unalterable as a gene code.

Beyond that small circle, of course, poverty was indeed fixed. If I bothered to walk ten blocks beyond our Duport Road enclave, I’d find myself in the middle of a workers’ quarter jammed with mostly illiterate young men from the country, tens of thousands of them with only a farm boy’s skills who had drifted into the city to find work, and finding none, had stayed to see their lives die on the vine, unplucked. They became thieves, pickpockets, extortionists, and beggars. They became drunks and drug addicts. Or they joined the army solely for the shelter and clothing it promised, and because they almost never got paid, they continued to steal, extort, and beg, only now with a gun in their hands. Joining them, plying their trade on these narrow streets at night, were loosely organized troops of prostitutes, most of them girls from the country following the boys, or girls kicked out of their villages by their husbands for having gotten pregnant in adultery or by their parents for having gotten pregnant out of wedlock. There were the so-called rope hotels, muddy, room-size squares of ground surrounded by a head-high cinder-block wall with a thatched roof on poles. Inside the walls, at the height of an adult’s armpit, ropes were strung like clothesline across the enclosed space. For a dime, a homeless man or woman could drape his or her weight over the rope like a blanket and sleep all night, dry and more or less safe from the dangerous streets and alleys. Babies, naked and crusted with fly-spotted sores played listlessly in puddles of sewage. Vast midden heaps at the edge of the city were ringed by settlements of huts made from refrigerator cartons, the rusted carcasses of wrecked cars, cast-off doors and broken crates — whole villages of human scavengers sifting the towering, constantly expanding piles for scraps of cloth or paper that could be used or sold, kids and old women fighting with the rats and packs of wild dogs for bits of tossed-out food. It all seemed so hopeless to me that I averted my gaze. I did not want to see what I could not begin to change.

Yet at any time, once my babies were born, I could have put my shoulder to the wheel of one or several of the dozens of volunteer and non-governmental charitable organizations that were stuck to their hubs in the mud of Liberian corruption, cynicism, and sloth. I could have distributed condoms, medical supplies, food, clean water, information. It was eight years between my marriage to Woodrow and my first return to America (an event I’ll tell you about very soon), and in those years I could have taught a hundred adults to read. I could have bribed a hundred parents to keep their daughters from working in the fields or on the streets and paid for the girls’ secondary-school education. I could have been a one-woman Peace Corps with no nationalist agenda, a one-woman charity with no religious program, a one-woman relief agency with no bureaucracy or salaried administrators to answer to. It wouldn’t have changed the world or human nature, and probably wouldn’t have altered a single sentence in the history of Liberia. But it would have changed me. And, a different person, I might have avoided some of the harm I inflicted later both on myself and others.

Instead, I gave out tips and Christmas bonuses and little presents on Boxing Day, a holiday that Liberians, not letting a good thing pass unappropriated, had borrowed from Sierra Leone. I dropped dimes and quarters into the cups of crippled and deformed, leprous, and amputated beggars on the streets of Monrovia, gave pennies to children who clustered around me whenever I stepped from the Mercedes, and although I myself did not attend services (a girl has to have some principles, I suppose), I supported Woodrow’s church by sending our children to its Sunday school with dollar bills for the collection plate tucked into pledge envelopes.

It was as if the people who lived there and the events that took place in those tumultuous years were deadly viruses, and I lived behind glass, a bubble-girl protected against infection from the outside world. Meanwhile, beyond my bubble the president and his cohort, which, despite my husband’s best efforts and advantageous marriage, still did not include him, grew fatter and richer and ever more flagrantly corrupt. They skimmed the cream off American foreign aid, blatantly stole from any and all non-governmental and UN public service allocations, took their cut from World Bank and IMF grants to the financial sector, and pimped the country’s natural resources, selling off at special, one-day-only rates Liberia’s rubber, sugar, rice, diamonds, iron, and water, peddling vast stands of mahogany and timber to companies owned and run by Swedes, Americans, Brits, Germans, and, increasingly, Israelis. Foreign distributors of beer, gasoline, motor vehicles, cigarettes, salt, electricity, and telephone service haggled over lunch for bargain-priced monopolies; by sundown they had the president’s fee safely deposited in his Swiss bank account and, after the celebratory banquet, partied the night away at the Executive Mansion with Russian hookers, smoking Syrian hashish, snorting lines of Afghan cocaine, and guzzling cases of Courvoisier.

The few Liberian journalists and politicians who dared to criticize the president and his cronies simply disappeared. As if sent on permanent assignment to Nigeria or Côte d’Ivoire, they were not mentioned again in public or private. Newspapers were locked down by judicial fiat, and radio stations were silenced, until the only news, little more than recycled releases from the president’s press office, was no news at all. Meanwhile, the president’s personal security force grew larger in number and actual physical size — big, scowling, swaggering men in sunglasses looking more and more like an army of private body guards than an elite corps of enlisted men — while the men in the regular army seemed to diminish in number and size, their uniforms tattered, torn, and dirty, their boots replaced by broken-backed sneakers and plastic sandals. Compared with the glistening black AK-47s carried by the president’s men, their rifles, obsolete U.S. Army leftovers from the Korean War, looked almost antique and were without ammunition. More like dangerous toys than deadly weapons, they were used mainly as clubs.

I knew all this as it happened, saw it with my own eyes, and learned the details and background and the names and motives of the people involved from Woodrow, from the few of his colleagues in government who, like Charles Taylor, trusted him, and from our social acquaintances — and, of course, I learned of it from Jeannine, who loved showing me that she knew more about the world of Liberian big men and their affairs than I did, and from Elizabeth, who had taken over my old job at the lab and whom I visited daily to be with the chimps. For, when it came down to it, the chimps had become my closest friends in Liberia, my only confidants, the only creatures to whom I entrusted my secrets, and whose secrets I kept and carried.

EARLY IN 1979—I think it was April, because the rains were about to begin — President Tolbert tacked a ten-cent-per-pound sales tax onto the already inflated retail price of rice. That winter’s measly crop had been worse than usual, and supplies of rice had diminished to a dangerous level. Rice was the country’s staple food. Without it, the people, especially the poor, faced starvation, and the nation faced famine. Stores and shops had emptied out, and black marketeers selling rice from Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire were getting rich at prices only the rich could afford.

“Why on earth do you need so much for a little one-pound bag of rice, Jeannine?”

“On account of it so dear now. Them don’t got no more at Dot-Dot, an’ none at Congo Square, neither. Peoples only can buy rice these days from the Arab, y’ know, an’ he sellin’ it very high priced.”

A Costa Rican freighter loaded with sacks of rice grown in Louisiana, meant originally for Haiti, and stamped USAID NOT FOR RESALE, lay at anchor in the harbor, waiting to be off-loaded. So far, on the president’s orders, the off-loading permit had been refused by customs, and the captain and crew hadn’t bothered to come ashore. For days, stevedores, dockworkers, retailers, and crowds of hopeful higglers with their gunny sacks, and women and girls from the countryside with empty pails and plastic buckets had gathered at the docks, waiting for the ship to tie up and the sacks of rice to be carried off and distributed among them.

While the people waited hopefully in the rain day after day and night after night for their rice to come in, it was a continuous, twenty-four-hour party, an informal, spontaneous carnival, with people dancing and singing in little groups on the docks, drinking raw palm wine, roasting scavenged groundnuts on charcoal fires, all good-naturedly, optimistically marking time. Each morning, as I passed in the Mercedes on my way to the lab, I saw that the crowd had grown larger. They seemed to be saying to themselves, We are hungry now, but we won’t be hungry long. Everyone believed it.

Then one morning the voice of President Tolbert himself came over the radio, and he announced the new tax on rice, a “people’s contribution” it was called, a way for Liberia to free itself from foreign debt, he said. Since rice was the main food for all Liberians, every single man, woman, and child would now be able to contribute to the nation’s independence. The legislature would pass the decree today, and then the ship currently waiting in the harbor of Monrovia would be off-loaded, and the rice distributed. And there were more ships coming, he promised. Ships from Nigeria, Brazil, and America were on the western horizon. Soon everyone would have plenty of rice — jollof rice, rice fufu, coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls…

The ten-cent tax per pound effectively doubled the street price at that time. No one, rich or poor, held any illusions as to where the money would end up. Having extracted as much as they could from foreign governments and corporations and sold off for a pittance nearly all the nation’s natural resources, the president and his colleagues, resorting to autocannibalism, had turned to devouring their own and had begun the meal with the most numerous and defenseless of their own, the poor. There was no meat on those bones, however. The poor had nothing left to give to the wealthy, not even ten cents per pound of rice. Having nothing more to lose, as soon as the president went off the air and no longer seemed to be watching them, they rioted.

It began shortly before I passed by the harbor in the car one morning on the way to the lab, which was located on the south side of the city near the JFK Hospital. As we approached the harbor front, we saw black clouds of smoke pouring into the gray sky. There were tires burning in the lot beside the dockside warehouse, and large crowds knotted around the fires, people shouting at one another, as if angry at themselves, rather than the president. They shook their fists, men and women alike, their faces dark with anger.

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked Satterthwaite, more curious than frightened.

Satterthwaite half-turned in front and said, “It on account of the tax.”

“What tax?” I asked.

“Ten cents a pound for rice. President Tolbert say it this mornin’ on the radio.”

A battered pickup truck with a half-dozen men in the back waving machetes crossed suddenly in front of the Mercedes. Satterthwaite hit the brakes and swerved away, bumping over the curb onto the harbor-front parking lot. Another vehicle, a small red taxi, pulled in behind us, and the pickup truck followed us over the curb onto the lot, swerved, and stopped in front, effectively blocking the Mercedes. The driver and another man jumped down from the pickup to the pavement and walked towards us.

“Don’t get out, don’t open the window, don’t say nothin’,” Satterthwaite said. I heard the door locks automatically clunk into place.

A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded the car. They began to rock it from side to side and bang on the trunk and hood with their fists like hammers. Most of them were shirtless, unshaven, their hair in long, springy coils. They waved their machetes and stared wild eyed into the back of the car, trying to see through the tinted glass — though I could see plainly enough their detonating faces, huge and black and wet with rain.

Two of the men thumped purposefully on Satterthwaite’s window, the leaders, evidently, ordinary workingmen in tee shirts and loose trousers. They had the faces of men who wished to negotiate. Satterthwaite lowered his window a few inches and spoke rapidly to them in pidgin.

In response, the men were shouting at Satterthwaite, as angry as the others now, apparently confused or not believing him, but he kept talking rapidly in a calm, low voice, until finally they grew quiet and listened and then at last instructed the others to back off. Satterthwaite turned and explained, “Them think we come from the president to tell the ship to give the rice to the government. Them think we the tax collectors, but now they see who we are, Miz Sundiata and her driver, so them say it all right for us to go.”

“Thank you,” I said.

It went suddenly quiet inside the car again, and the pickup pulled away from the Mercedes, freeing us to leave. Satterthwaite put the car in gear and inched forward and gave a gentle, grateful wave to the men, who politely, almost apologetically waved back.

At that moment, as if they’d been watching and waiting for us to leave the scene, a pair of army trucks filled with helmeted soldiers appeared, engines grinding, and blocked the departure of all three vehicles, the pickup, the red taxi, and the Mercedes. Two jeeps braked to a quick stop beside our car, and dozens of soldiers jumped from the trucks and jeeps and dragged the drivers from the pickup and the taxi, beating the heads and faces of the men with rifle butts, sending their now pathetic-looking machetes clattering to the pavement, kicking the men, rolling their bodies away from the Mercedes like logs. Blood sprayed from noses, ears, broken mouths, and from inside the car I heard muffled howls cut by the sound of human bones being cracked and splintered. The wild men with machetes who moments ago had terrified me were transformed with terrible efficiency into sacks and tossed into the rear of the trucks.

I yelled at Satterthwaite, “For God’s sake, get us out of here!”

A soldier waved us on. Satterthwaite hit the accelerator, and in seconds we were back on Gamba Boulevard, headed south and out of the city. I gazed out the windows through the steady rain at the nearly empty streets and alleys. Abruptly, halfway to the lab, I told Satterthwaite to turn around and drive me home. “Take the back way, stay out of town,” I said.

And so it was back to the bubble, then. When we pulled into the yard, Woodrow was standing at the door, arms folded across his chest, waiting. The dogs posed alertly beside him like sentries. He’d returned home from the ministry as soon as he learned from the radio what had happened down at the docks and was now spreading to all parts of the city.

We watched and listened to the Rice Riot, as it came to be called, from behind the high, gated wall that surrounded our home on Duport Road. The riot sprawled uphill from the waterfront, as the crowd of ordinary folks broke away from the soldiers sent to subdue them quickly became a mob led and egged on by gangs of boys and young men drunk on palm wine and high on marijuana and Lord knows what else. They stormed up the long ridge into the center of town, smashing windows and burning trash, then looting stores, dressing in looted clothing and lugging TVs, radios, tape decks, electric fans, and blenders like trophies. They overturned cars, massed in the squares and at crossroads, swelling in size and noise as they went, beating on stolen pails and cook pans, blowing whistles, chanting, dancing. It was a headless beast, thrashing in pain and confusion.

Woodrow and I and the boys, Satterthwaite, Jeannine and Kuyo, we all peered from behind the barred windows of the house and watched the smoke rise in smudged clouds, billowing skyward through the rain, first from one district, then from another, more distant district, and felt relieved that the rioters seemed to be moving south and west, away from our neighborhood and in the direction of the Liberian government buildings and the foreign embassies, towards the dead end of palm-lined Gamba Boulevard, where the bright white Executive Mansion ruled, as if the beast were moving blindly, instinctively, towards the source of its pain.

It was unclear, however, what the mob expected to do once it reached the palace. Stand outside in the thousands and raise their fists in anger and frustration? Try to tell of their sorrow and pain and hunger, their fear of having to watch their children die? Tell the foreigners of their plight, yes, tell the world, if possible, but especially tell the president, the hulking, glowering man in the blue, pinstriped Savile Row suit and exquisite Italian necktie, who looked down from his office window, gazed across the mint-green lawns and gardens to the ten-foot-high wall of wrought-iron spikes protecting the palace grounds from the street, where his people cried out and clung to the iron bars and banged against them with sticks, machetes, and fists. Tell the president, who, after a few moments of contemplating the crowd, its growing size, its fury and suicidal desperation — suicidal because they had come to the Executive Mansion, the most protected building in the country, where they had effectively trapped themselves in a cul-de-sac against an iron wall — walked calmly from the window to his desk, picked up the telephone, and called his minister of security.

Shortly after that, clanking and snorting like mechanical bulls, the tanks appeared, three of them, grinding along the boulevard towards the huge crowd, slowly passing the European and Israeli and American embassies, whose gates were locked shut from inside, the bridges over the moats raised, and behind the tanks marched a battalion of soldiers from the president’s security force. These grim men were not regular army enlistees. They came helmeted, wearing full battle gear, carrying M-16s and AK-47s. These men were not riot police, like the men we battled in Chicago in ’68 and ’69. They weren’t National Guardsmen, ill-trained reservists given unfamiliar weapons and called unexpectedly to duty, like the frightened boys who’d shot students at Kent State. No, these were men who were trained and armed and brought out of their barracks today for one purpose only, to shoot down as many people as their officers ordered, even if they had to run down and fire point-blank at members of their own tribe, killing their friends and neighbors, possibly even family members, men, women, and children, all of them unarmed, helpless against the tanks and guns.

BBC radio parroted the official Liberian News Agency’s report that seven civilians had been killed and three soldiers, and that the soldiers had fired only in self-defense. But we learned afterwards — not from any newspaper or radio broadcast, but from hushed conversations with friends and servants — that hundreds, as many as six hundred, some said, of poor and hungry, utterly defenseless Liberians were shot dead that day. Jeannine said the hospitals were filled to overflowing with injured people and had begun to turn away anyone who could not walk in and, after receiving emergency repairs, walk out. Hundreds of people had been shot point-blank, others had been crushed beneath the tanks: children in their mothers’ arms; the mothers themselves; teenaged boys and girls caught up in the riot merely because they happened to be on the streets that day, choosing a wild, out-of-control block party over a day in the classroom; men and women who may well have hoped for a coup to grow out of the riot but were not themselves guilty of plotting one, merely of hoping for one; and opportunistic, drunken thieves and looters living out a materialist fantasy. It was said that dozens of young men had been carried off in trucks and coldly executed, their dismembered bodies destroyed in vats of hydrochloric acid or secretly burned and buried in the bush. It was said that a U.S. destroyer had anchored offshore, and another, filled with U.S. Marines, was steaming over from Freetown to join it. We were told that American helicopters had been on their way from Robertsfield Airport to remove all embassy personnel, if necessary, and carry out any U.S. citizens who considered him- or herself in danger.

Which did not include me, of course. As long as President Tolbert, my husband’s boss, remained in charge of the situation, my children and I were in no danger. And Tolbert remained in charge. By evening, a nervous, fearful calm had descended over the city, over the entire country, in fact, and the following morning the loud, hearty voice of the president boomed from the radio, telling us that thanks to the courage and discipline of the Liberian armed forces, a coup had been averted, the back of the rebellion had been broken, and a communist-inspired revolution had been thwarted. Once again the Republic of Liberia had been preserved by the brave, freedom-loving men and women of Liberia who had remained loyal to the president’s True Whig party. And to reward the people for their faithfulness to him and his party, the cruel tax on rice, which had been imposed by the Congress while secretly under the influence of certain devious and disloyal elements in the opposition, had been rescinded by presidential order. Three cheers for the True Whig party.

“Hip, hip, hooray!” the president sang. He’s drunk, I thought.

Woodrow said, “Well, I guess that settles things. We can’t allow ourselves to be ruled by mobs.”

I agreed. The good wife. Satterthwaite sagely nodded. Yas, Boss. And Jeannine hurried out to buy rice.

THE TRUE WHIG PARTY had run Liberia almost from its nineteenth-century inception, back when the country, supposedly no longer the African stepchild of America, was first declared a republic. No one we knew was opposed to the president or belonged to any party other than his. In spite of my husband’s backroom role in these events — for he was, after all, a member of the president’s administration — and in spite of the fact that my three sons were, like their father, citizens of the Republic of Liberia, my personal connections to the events remained tangential. I was like an asteroid passing through the farthest orbits of the Liberian planetary system, crossing on a long elliptical path determined eons ago in a different solar system. My and my family’s orbits had a barely measurable effect on one another. I still believed that as long as my children, my husband, and I were physically safe and reasonably comfortable, the country and I were nearly irrelevant to each other.

Then one rainy November night in 1979, seven months after the Rice Riot, I remember waking very late to the sound of deliberately lowered male voices, Woodrow’s and that of another man, coming from the living room. Their rumblings, anxious and urgent, rose slowly and then quickly fell, as if they’d remembered freshly that they didn’t want to be overheard. I slipped from bed and in the dark made my way down the hall towards the living room, and just as I reached the entryway, saw the silhouette of a large, broad-shouldered man leaving by the front door. It clicked shut, and Woodrow sat down at his desk, sighed audibly, and lighted a cigarette.

“Was that Charles?”

Without looking at me, he said, “No.” Then, after a pause, “Yes, actually. He sent you his love, but had to rush off.”

“Why was Charles here this late? Is something wrong?”

“No. Business.”

“Really? Business? It’s almost three, Woodrow.”

“Business.”

“Oh.”

He sighed a second time, giving up for the moment — too much effort to lie. “Yes. Dangerous business, actually. Charles has gone and formed a political party. To oppose the president.” He paused again. “Seems like a terrible idea. Especially now, so soon after the riots.”

“You told him that.”

“I told him that. Yes.” He explained that Charles had tried to convince Woodrow to join this new party, to be called the People’s Progressive Party, and help him organize a referendum to cut short the two years remaining on Tolbert’s eight-year term. If the referendum passed, a new election would be held in the fall. And Charles was thinking of putting himself forward for president. “He wants me to declare against the True Whig candidate and run for the Senate from Gibo, where Fuama is located. My home district.”

“This is a ridiculous idea, right? To cut yourself off from the president and the party? To oppose him?”

“Oh, definitely! Definitely ridiculous. Hopeless. But Charles is an ambitious man. And a rather reckless one.”

“And you’re not?”

“Ambitious, yes. But not reckless.”

We both remained silent for a long moment. He poured a drink from the open bottle at his desk and drank it down. Then looked up at me, half surprised to see me still standing there at the door in my nightgown. “Go to bed, Hannah darling,” he said.

“Are you safe, Woodrow?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I turned him down flat. Go to bed.”

“But does this put you against Charles now?”

“No. Not really. He may not see it that way now, but he will.”

“What about him? Is Charles safe?”

“He’ll be fine, as long as his referendum never gets held. And it won’t. There’s no way the president will permit it. And with no referendum, there’ll be no early election. Good night, my dear. I still have work to do,” he said, and turned back to the papers strewn across his desk. His jaw clenched and unclenched, like a nervous fist. “Hannah, please,” he said without looking up. “Go to bed.”

He’s frightened to death, I thought. He’s pretending to work so as to avoid visions of his own imprisonment and execution. And ours. I suddenly realized that it was a thing he had been doing for many months now. Possibly years. He knew that his life, and therefore ours, mine and my sons’, were precariously held. How stupid I’ve been! I thought. Too self-absorbed, too obsessed with my own memories, dreams, and reflections to see the danger that surrounded us. And for the first time, I, too, was frightened.

YET IN SPITE of my fear, or perhaps because of it, I kept inside my bubble and stayed deliberately detached, rigorously uninvolved, all the way through a series of cascading events, one falling hard upon the next, that threatened to crack the bubble open like an egg. These were events that no one, least of all I, could have anticipated. Charles Taylor did indeed form his People’s Progressive Party and called for a nationwide referendum to void the remaining two years of the president’s term. A week later, the Senate of Liberia unanimously passed an act specifically banning the party, and Charles, to avoid arrest and probable execution, fled the country. He was said to be the house-arrested guest of Libya’s President Ghaddafi, who refused to extradite him back to Liberia. It was a small favor, easily given, one that might someday elicit ample repayment — either from Tolbert, for having kept Charles under lock and key, or, if Tolbert fell, from Charles, for having refused to extradite him.

Back in Monrovia, everyone suspected that Tolbert had lost the support of the Americans. It was thought that the Americans had begun to mistrust the president’s engorged ego and greed and his increasing recklessness and were about to abandon their man in Africa, cutting him loose both of their restraints and of their protection. If you want a big dog, the Americans believed, you have to give him a long leash. But not too long. For a decade, William Tolbert, the president of Liberia, had been one of the Americans’ big dogs. Maybe now they were switching the leash to Charles Taylor. Maybe Charles would return in triumph from Libya and become the next president of Liberia.

It was a not-uncommon syndrome in Africa in those years, in which a puppet president gradually became a self-deluded despot who no longer remembered who was really in charge of his country. After years of feeding and lavishly housing the leader and his cronies, the citizens finally grow hungry and angry enough to riot in the streets. The leader calls out the army and brutally shuts down any and all opposition. Soon, however, the army, unpaid for months, becomes demoralized, and the officer corps gives evidence of increasing unreliability — a reluctance to follow orders passed down from the commander-in-chief, loud demands for back pay or, with national cash reserves having long since dried up and no cash money available, demands for increased emoluments and political payoffs and perks — until finally, with the leader no longer able to buy their loyalty, the officers come together and plot the leader’s overthrow and replace him with one of their own.

Around four o’clock of the afternoon of the coup, Woodrow telephoned and said he had to stay late at the ministry and might have to remain there overnight. “There’s a bit of a crisis over here,” he said with typical understatement. “And by the way, you’d better keep off the streets until tomorrow at least. There’ve been reports of a few rows between the army and the police out there. Nothing serious, you understand, but I’ll send Satterthwaite over, if you like,” he added.

“We weren’t going anywhere, anyhow. No need to send Satterthwaite. He’ll just want to hang around and read his comic books,” I said blandly, Satterthwaite having become my least favorite member of the household. The truth is, though Jeannine and I had grown somewhat more cautious in our movements through the city since the Rice Riot a year earlier, by the same token, because the anger of the rioters had not been directed against our home, we felt oddly, perhaps unrealistically, protected by our high wall and locked gate, our brave dogs, and our status.

“Stay as late as you like. We’ll be fine,” I said, not in the least curious as to the nature of the crisis at the ministry. About once a month, due to a “bit of a crisis” or an unexpected cabinet meeting or the sudden need to entertain a visiting foreign dignitary or corporate chieftain, Woodrow did not come home until dawn or midday the next day, arriving rumpled, exhausted, smelling of whiskey, cigar smoke, and cheap perfume. I never asked him where he’d been. I could guess easily enough, of course, but had no desire to confront him. By then I had come to welcome his shabbily contrived absences. I saw them as earning moral capital for me; moral debt for himself. We were drifting steadily apart, each of us in a different way, I thought, preparing for the inevitable split.

The night of the coup, however, Woodrow surprised me and did not stay out till dawn or beyond. Instead he arrived home around one a.m. Jeannine and I rushed from our bedrooms to the living room to see who or what had caused the dogs to bark. I flipped on the light, and there he was, standing by the door like a burglar caught in the act.

“You’re home early,” I said.

“Yes.” Then, speaking slowly, almost with a drawl, he said, “I’m lucky to be home at all, if you want to know the truth. Have you been listening to the radio?”

“No. I was at the lab till supper, and Jeannine was with the boys all afternoon outside. Why? Did we miss something?”

“You missed something, yes.” Quickly, he told us what had happened that afternoon and evening and gave us an indication of what would likely happen tomorrow. A dozen enlisted men led by an illiterate master sergeant named Samuel Doe had pushed their way into the Executive Mansion, and facing barely token opposition from the president’s personal security force, had captured Tolbert and placed him under arrest. Their boldness and the suddenness of the attack had bought them sufficient time and unpredictability to let them capture and imprison in a single afternoon all of the president’s ministers, including, of course, Woodrow, along with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the few generals still loyal to William Tolbert. The soldiers simply walked into the offices, homes, and restaurants where the officials happened to be working or dining and took them at gunpoint to the damp, windowless cells at Barclay Barracks. By midnight, Sergeant Doe and his men had released several of the lesser ministers, again including Woodrow, and the generals, in exchange for their pledge of support for the coup. They announced over the radio that they had overthrown William Tolbert’s corrupt and barbarous regime. Sergeant Doe stammered and stumbled his way through the announcement, as if making it up as he went along. Then he and his men eviscerated the president with their bayonets and tossed him and his guts from the window of his office to the lawn below.

“These boys mean business. They’re going to clean house,” Woodrow said, and poured himself three fingers of whiskey and drank it off.

“What are you going to do? What are the Americans doing?” I asked.

“The usual. They’re evacuating most of their embassy staff and any U.S. nationals who want to leave. The cultural attaché over there, Sam Clement, called to check on you and the boys, actually. Kind of surprised me. I guess they still regard you as a U.S. citizen over there. Anyhow, I told him we’ll be all right,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“These new boys, they know they’re going to need a few people like me just to keep things running. They’re enlisted men is all, soldiers, sergeants and corporals, mostly illiterate Krahn country boys, and they’re already scared of what they’ve done. They even want Charles Taylor to come home and help them run the country,” he said, and abruptly gave a pleased cackle. “Ha! I may come out of this with a promotion!”

Jeannine in her nightgown and cotton robe, castoffs I’d given her, stood listening at the door, half hidden in the darkness of the hallway. “You wan’ some supper, Mistah Sundiata?” she asked. She rubbed her eyes like a child wakened unexpectedly from sleep.

“No, no, I’m fine! You two go on to bed. I’ve got to check through my files. There are some things I’d just as soon keep out of the hands of anyone who might come looking,” he said, and poured himself another drink. “Can’t be too careful at a time like this.” His face was covered with a film of sweat, whether with excitement or fear I couldn’t tell. Possibly, in this climate, it was the whiskey: Scotch is a northern-latitude drink. Woodrow’s consumption of alcohol had gradually increased over the last year or so, and I’d begun to suspect that he was becoming an alcoholic. I’d never lived with an alcoholic before and wasn’t sure what to expect or how to measure the disease’s stealthy approach.

“I’ll fix you some chicken,” Jeannine said and headed for the kitchen.

“Fine, fine, fine. I’ll eat it in here!” he hollered.

“Good night, Woodrow,” I said, and turned and walked slowly down the hallway to my bed. I wondered if the symptoms of alcoholism were different for Africans than for Americans, for blacks than for whites. A drunk is a drunk, I decided, regardless of his race or culture.

A while later, from the bedroom, I smelled paper burning. The living room fireplace was mostly for decorative purposes and had a lousy draft, but was cheering on a rain-chilled evening. Woodrow was cleaning out his files, erasing paper trails that might link him to the doomed and despised president and his inner circle, a circle that Woodrow had for so long tried to join but that, despite his best efforts at flattery, servility, and faithfulness, had rebuffed him. No wonder he seemed almost pleased by the coup. No wonder he’d cackled with delight at the prospect of his good friend Charles Taylor’s triumphant return.

Sometime later, I was wakened by a woman’s light laugh. Jeannine’s? Then silence. I could still smell the smoke of burnt paper, but it was old, cold smoke now. It was nearly dawn, birds were making their first chirps, and Woodrow still hadn’t come in to bed. Then I heard that all-too-familiar thumping, the sound of my headboard being bumped against the wall by Woodrow’s tireless thrusting — only this time, for the first time, it wasn’t my bed, our bed, and the wall wasn’t the one behind my pillow. I knew at once that Woodrow was with Jeannine, and the bed was hers, the wall the one behind her head in the small room beyond the boys’ bedroom. I lay there curled on my side like a question mark, listening, unable to shut out the sound of my husband fucking his niece, my sons’ nanny, my friend, perhaps the only human friend I had in those days. And did I want to do the normal thing — leap from my bed, run down the hall, fling open the door to Jeannine’s room, and shriek bloody murder at the treacherous bitch and bastard adulterer of a husband? Did I want to expose and humiliate them both? Would my relationship with the two of them be forever changed?

No. None of it. It was as if they had been doing this for years, since the first week of our marriage, and I had come to accept it as normal and even necessary. Simply, it was how we lived now, Woodrow and the boys and I. And, of course, it was payback for my little tryst with Satterthwaite. We were all adulterers. I knew that, restless, agitated, still exhilarated by having come so close to death and escaped, Woodrow had walked into Jeannine’s room and slid into her bed, spread her legs, and begun to fuck her. He was exercising his prerogative as head of the household, and she had merely accepted his heavy, sweating presence atop her as natural and inevitable. I grabbed Woodrow’s pillow and covered my ears with it, muffling the sound of his betrayal and Jeannine’s easy compliance.

A moment of relative silence, the only sound my own throbbing pulse, and then the thumping of Jeannine’s bed against the wall gradually began to filter through the pillow, and I could hear them again. I took the pillow away and lay on my back listening, as on and on it went, like the steadily pounding piston of an engine, while the ground doves outside my window began to gurgle and pepperbirds began to sing, a rooster crowed, a car drove slowly past the house, and someone in the house next door, in the kitchen just beyond the terrace outside our bedroom, turned on the radio. A man was speaking from the radio, his voice a weird blend of authority and confusion — Samuel Doe, the new head of state for the Republic of Liberia. He was announcing the execution of the president and the arrest of fifteen traitors and giving the time and place of their upcoming public execution.

Later that day, in a now-infamous episode, Sergeant Doe and his men hauled thirteen of the ministers, the Supreme Court justice, and the major general who had run the president’s security apparatus down to the beach a mile south of the city, where, before a huge, cheering crowd, they erected fifteen telephone poles in the sand, stripped their victims, most of them fat, old men, to their underwear, tied them to the poles, and shot them literally to pieces. The executioners were drunk, and consequently had to fire hundreds of rounds into the bodies to be sure that the old men were dead. Many in the crowd snapped photos and videotaped the event, and all day long, with loudspeakers mounted on truck beds blaring juju and reggae, the people sang and danced in drunken celebration, while buzzards circled overhead and small yellow dogs worked their way closer and closer to the fly-blown carcasses tied to the poles — meat rotting in the sun.

THOUGH WORSE WAS to come, 1983, my eighth year in Liberia, was a hard one for me. But who knew what was coming? Certainly I didn’t. I was forty now and honestly believed that the truly difficult part of my life was behind me. Oh, sure, I knew I’d have to face individual crises in the future — who doesn’t? My three sons, as they grew into adolescence and beyond, were bound to create episodes of fear and trembling; my marriage to Woodrow someday soon would have to withstand the blows of middle-age, mine as much as his, and the eventual departure of the boys from home, and the culmination, disappointing, of Woodrow’s career, for I knew by then, even though he’d been made minister, a full member of the cabinet, that he was never going to get inside the inner circle of power that was now centered on Samuel Doe. I was already hearing anxious grumbles from Woodrow about my own career — although I still hesitated to call it that, my work with the chimps, my dreamers.

But I pictured these coming events and crises as separate beads on a string, individually not too heavy to bear, collectively merely the defining weight of a life, my life, anyone’s. In the last year, however, I’d begun to believe that all my future dark days, like those of most people I knew, even here in Liberia, would be matched about evenly by future days of brightness. Darkness would be canceled by light, neutralized, evened off, so that when I grew old and died, I’d come out at zero. In the game of life, all I expected, all I hoped for, was to come out even, a zero-sum game.

These aren’t low expectations for a life, exactly. They aren’t high, either. But for me, as I entered my forty-first year, my expectations and hopes had at last met one another and were a solid fit, a balanced scale, yin and yang, hand in glove. No more dreams of revolution, no more millenarian expectations, no more longing for utopia. I called my newly achieved state of mind realism and almost never used words like bourgeois anymore. I was standing on solid ground now. Terra firma. Yes, indeed — realism. My mother and father were still afloat in clouds of unknowing, maybe, but I had finally created for myself a life that neither imitated theirs nor stood in simple reaction to it. After all these years, I could say to myself that I had freed myself from my parents. It may have taken rather too long, but I’d done it.

I’d even begun talking with Woodrow about returning to the States with the boys to visit my parents. Their American grandparents. Could he arrange it with the American embassy, possibly through the cultural officer? Whatzisname, Sam Clement? Or could he speak informally to the U.S. ambassador himself about issuing a passport for Dawn Sundiata, née Carrington, with the boys traveling on Woodrow’s Liberian VIP passport, so there’d be no nasty surprises when we arrived in the States?

“It can be arranged, of course,” Woodrow said. “Bit of a turnaround, though, wouldn’t you say?”

We were at dinner at home, eating on the patio, the five of us, a peaceful moonlit evening at the end of the rainy season. For the first time in months, I could hear the dry clatter of the palms in the warm breeze. “Don’t jump the gun,” I said to him and poured myself a third glass of wine. The boys had left the table and were being bathed now by Jeannine. “I’m only giving the idea some idle consideration,” I explained. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately, maybe because hitting forty makes me realize how old they are. I’ve started to worry about their health, actually. And I’m feeling more guilt with each passing year, Woodrow. Guilt for the distance between us. And there’s the boys to think of. Really. I don’t want the boys to grow up without knowing anything more about my parents than they would if I were an orphan.”

“Ah, well, that’s true for me, too, you know.” Woodrow lighted a Dunhill cigarette, pushed back his chair, and crossed his legs. He watched me carefully, as if he thought something new and puzzling might be happening here.

“The boys know your parents. It’s mine I’m talking about.”

“I mean that I myself sometimes think of you as an orphan. But you’re not, are you?”

Most of what Woodrow knew of my past he’d learned years ago, when I first came over from Ghana, from a small sheaf of information gleaned from that file folder slipped to him by the same American cultural attaché, Sam Clement. I didn’t know what was in that file and wasn’t sure I wanted to know, so hadn’t asked. It wasn’t until nearly a year after we were married that Woodrow had actually showed me the folder, and he did it for his reasons, not mine.

He brought it from his office one afternoon and carried it out to the lab compound, where I was sitting at my desk logging genealogical data on the baby chimps. He dropped the folder on top of my logbook, and I opened and read through it quickly and in silence, while he sat on the corner of my cluttered desk and waited. An oscillating fan on the desk hummed and drifted back and forth, riffling the papers in the folder. It wasn’t much, barely two single-spaced, typed pages and fuzzy copies of the photos used for the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1970, after the Greenwich Village townhouse bombing that sent me and the entire Weather cohort permanently underground.

I sighed heavily at the sight of my old face. It brought me reluctantly to grieve all over again for someone I’d loved and whose death I thought I’d gotten over, not the three friends who’d been killed in the explosion — I never really knew them more than slightly from the various national SDS conventions — but the late, unlamented Hannah Musgrave. Here it all was again: the names and dates, the tired facts of my biography up to then, the description of my few skills and talents. It was the CV of a small-time, would-be domestic terrorist. Sad. Pathetic.

“Why are you showing this to me now? You had it when I got here, when I first came over from Accra, didn’t you?”

“You’re my wife now. If I’m ever asked, I should know what’s true and what’s a lie. In case I have to defend you. I’ve seen files like this before, you know; the president has a cabinet stuffed with files just like this, and they’re mostly lies, lies and false confessions. But bits and pieces are true.”

“Yes,” I said. “But everything’s pretty much true, what’s in there.”

“Pretty much?”

“Except … well, except that I never knew what was happening anywhere other than where I myself happened to be, and I wasn’t responsible for anything that I didn’t do personally. Which wasn’t much, believe me. We weren’t that stupid or naive. We were in these small cells, what we called foco groups, and mine was in New Bedford, Massachusetts. So when that townhouse blew up and killed those three people, I was as shocked as everyone else. I hadn’t heard from any of those people in years, didn’t even know if they were still part of Weather or not. Same with the Pentagon bombing and most of the others. The New York police stations. All of them, actually. That was the idea, to keep the cells separate. Only the three or four people at the top — the Weather Bureau, we called them — knew what all the cells were supposed to be doing, and they knew only in a general way. We were instructed to invent and implement our own individual attacks on the government cell by cell. Some of the cells were really creative and bold. But others, like mine, were incompetent and timid and more or less driven by fantasy. You have to understand, Woodrow, most of us were like actors in a play that on a barely conscious level was mainly about disappearing. About breaking with your past. You know?”

“Your past. I don’t understand.”

“Well, that was me, husband. I was mainly trying to break from my past. Of course, what I thought I was doing…”

“What was wrong with your past?” Woodrow interrupted. “I mean, that you wanted to break from it?”

He was never going to get it. No matter what I said or how far back in my life I went with him, my pain and sorrow and my anger and shame were too weirdly American for Woodrow to grasp what had transformed me from a college coed worried about keeping her real name on the dean’s list to a hard-as-nails terrorist on the run under a false name. Or what had transformed the terrorist into the two-named wife — three names, actually — of the Liberian minister of public health, the mother of his sons. How could he be expected to get those changes when I barely understood them myself? If I told him everything that had been left out of that thin folder, if I made the story of my life real to him, like I’m trying to do for you, he’d be afraid, rightly, that I could be transformed yet again into something equally strange. Or even changed back into what I had been before. The coed. The political activist. The fantasist. The maker of bombs.

I wasn’t going to put that fear onto him, I decided, not after all he’d done for me so far and showed every sign of continuing to do. Despite all, Woodrow was a good and generous man, there was no denying it, and I loved those qualities in him and benefited from them and fully expected to benefit from them for the rest of my life. I was not altogether sure, even early in our marriage, that I loved him, however. The essential Woodrow. Whoever, whatever, that was.

I understood, perhaps better than he, that I could no more make sense of his past than he could mine. We were a husband and wife who could not imagine the texture and content of each other’s consciousness as they had existed prior to the day we first met. Woodrow, too, had been transformed many times. A boy from a West African village had turned into an American college student, a black-skinned foreigner with an exotic accent, a young man who, in time, had become a Liberian cabinet minister married to a white American woman. If I knew his story, the whole of it, I, too, might be frightened by the possibility of still farther transformations to come. What if he became again the boy from a West African village? He seemed on the verge of it whenever we visited Fuama. What if he still secretly was that boy, now become a man, with a second and third wife and still maintained sexual control over his female cousins and nieces? Not just Jeannine. Or became again the black African college boy imitating the white American college boys, drinking too much, playing with drugs, screwing the coeds whether they liked it or not? I’d known some African students like that at Brandeis, although most of them had been enrolled elsewhere, the technical and business schools in Cambridge and Boston proper, out looking for hot, guilt-ridden, liberal white girls turned on by negritude but scared of American blacks.

Consequently, neither I nor Woodrow had sought to learn the other’s story. The rough outline, a few typed pages in a file folder, was enough. No details necessary. No late-night connubial reminiscing for Mr. and Mrs. Sundiata. No lengthy descriptions of anyone other than the husband and wife sitting across from each other at the table right this moment, the man and the woman lingering over the last of the evening’s wine, with the dinner dishes and serving bowls cluttering the space between them, palm trees flipping their fronds in the breezy dark, tree frogs advertising their wares, the giggles and splashes of the boys in their bath, and Jeannine’s low, monitoring scold as she hurries them to dry and into their American pajamas, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Pluto.

WHEN IS IT TIME to flee your country? “When they shoot your dogs,” is what people say. There was no warning — there seldom is — not even the sound of a car or truck pulling up at the high, chain-locked gate. The dogs barked once, more in surprise than fear or anger, a yelp of astonishment, then a rapid set of gunshots, six or seven, and the two Rottweilers were dead. Andy and Beemus — Woodrow’s pride, his beautiful black thugs imported from Zimbabwe, goofy, meat-eating playmates for his children and fierce protectors of his household — lay in the driveway between the rear of the Mercedes and the iron gate, large mounds of bleeding black dirt, as four helmeted soldiers carrying automatic rifles opened the gate as if they had the key — wait, they did have the key: in the dark we saw that one of the soldiers … no, it was a civilian with them, a man wearing a navy-blue suit and tie, looking as if he’d just come from a board meeting, a man whom both Woodrow and I recognized at once, in spite of the soft gloom that surrounded him, when he looked across the yard at us and dropped the key in a showy way into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, at which point Woodrow and I heard a truck rumble to a stop on the street beyond the gate and wall, and a second later the yard was filled with soldiers.

As many as twenty, I would later recall, but to do so I had to concentrate on where in the driveway and yard, patio and house the soldiers had positioned themselves, which was difficult for me afterwards, because mainly I remembered first the dogs’ being shot dead in a single burst of gunfire, Woodrow leaping from his chair and knocking the wine bottle onto the tile floor, where it smashed into tiny green slivers, and my realization that the boys were barefoot.

“Stay inside!” I shouted to them. “Don’t come out here!” I wasn’t as frightened yet of the stone-faced young soldiers as of the broken glass that could cut my babies’ tender, pink-bottomed feet. “Don’t come out here till I sweep!” I yelled, when Woodrow and I were suddenly surrounded by these men, Samuel Doe’s own personal security force. I noticed that much, but since they were with, possibly led by, our friend and Woodrow’s colleague, Charles Taylor, then the soldiers had no imaginable reason to be here.

I remember feeling oddly distant from them and unafraid, in spite of what I knew about these men, their cold-blooded brutality and sadism, their fearful capacity for murder, rape, torture, and worse. The stories I’d heard — rumors is all they were — of drug-fueled ritual dismemberments, amputations, cannibalism, were of a savagery beyond anything I’d ever read or heard of before and still I had not yet decided whether to believe them. One couldn’t believe those stories; human beings just don’t act that way. Anyhow, this wasn’t happening to me. It was as if I were watching a movie, an amateur movie staged as some sort of training exercise made for new recruits from the countryside. This is how you bring in an important man for questioning by the leader. You kill his dogs first. Then with a key obtained earlier from the man’s caretaker — who may well be his nephew or brother-in-law, but not to worry, the man will know the consequences if he refuses to turn over the key — you simply open the gate and quickly seal off all means of escape from the compound. You place the important man and his white American wife under guard with four of your men, the same four who shot the dogs and were the first to enter the compound, while the others round up the three terrified little boys in their pajamas, their useless, hysterical nanny, the sleeping maid — the children and the servants to be kept under guard in a room of the house well out of sight of the mother and the father, preferably a room without windows, the utility room at the back. All this is to take place in thirty to forty-five seconds, during which time you slap handcuffs on the important man. Treat him roughly, as if he were a goat going to slaughter. And keep between him and his wife. Push her against the outer wall of the house. Don’t look at her eyes, her strange, pale blue eyes. Everyone, even including the civilian in charge of the operation, Charles Taylor, who will be known personally to the woman and the important man, will speak only in Liberian, so she won’t understand what is happening or else she’s likely to interfere and complicate matters. Her husband, the important man, will understand all too well.

I remember that their eyes locked, Woodrow’s and Charles’s, and I realized that one of the two had betrayed the other, or perhaps not yet; but both knew that, if it hadn’t happened yet, the betrayal was coming. It was a strange, fierce exchange of gazes between the two men, the minister and the man who had been sent to fetch him by the leader, that illiterate ex-sergeant, Samuel Doe, the master of the coup that had executed the previous president and his cabinet three years earlier. I knew him; we all did. Liberia is a small country, and we all knew what kind of man he was. His paranoia and secrecy and penchant for torture had kept the country loyal out of fear of him, starting with his ministers and judges in particular, but the small men in government as well, all the way down to the non-commissioned officers in his personal security force, the enlisted soldiers in the army, customs officers, cops in the street, the private guards at the banks, even the caretakers and watchmen. The leader’s cruelty and greed and his limitless lust for power in his petty kingdom had corrupted his subjects from top to bottom, including the two men facing each other here on the patio, my husband and his friend, two minor ministers in the cabinet, one evidently sent to arrest the other by the leader himself, who, in his enormous, white, limestone house on Mamba Point was at that moment probably swilling fifty-year-old Napoleon brandy and crowing with delight, because, as I soon learned, he was convinced that the two of them, Charles Taylor, the Gio, and Woodrow Sundiata, the Kpelle, both of them clever village boys, American-educated college boys, had been stealing from the president’s personal cache of millions of dollars originally sent to Liberia as American foreign aid. The leader knew this was true. The Americans had shown him the proof. The leader was a shrewd judge of character and circumstance and no doubt believed that Sundiata was the weaker of the two ministers, weak because he was married and had children, and therefore would betray his friend Taylor very quickly, very easily, probably by midnight, especially if Taylor were the one sent to arrest him. And then the leader would have both thieves in his grasp, instead of only one, as would have been the case if he’d chosen to arrest Taylor first. That man, Taylor, was too angry and too strong inside to confess or incriminate anyone else. Taylor would have let the leader’s men torture him to death — not to protect Woodrow, whom he felt superior to, like all the Gio, but to infuriate the leader, whom he loathed and whose power and wealth he coveted.

Charles and Woodrow spoke in Liberian pidgin, and I could barely understand them. Even so, right away it was clear that something much more complicated and dangerous than a mistaken or false arrest was taking place, for Woodrow seemed to understand very well why the Minister of Public Services, his good friend and longtime colleague, had invaded his house, shot his dogs, terrorized his family, and clapped him in irons. And Charles — I knew him well enough now to call him Charles, I’d danced with him and shared fond reminiscences with him of Massachusetts, where he’d attended Bentley College — seemed disgusted with himself, as if he’d fallen for an old trick, as if he knew that somehow Woodrow was not the prisoner here, he was. Woodrow spoke too quickly for me to translate, but I knew that he was making a plea. Yet he was not exactly pleading. He was asking Charles to be sensible.

Charles told him to shut his fucking mouth. I understood that. Then in English, Charles said to me, “It’s all right, he’ll probably be home by morning. But you stay here, stay with your children and your people. Don’t let anyone leave the house until Woodrow returns. You understand me, woman?”

I nodded, and Charles walked quickly away, followed by Woodrow and the four soldiers who held their guns on him as if they expected him to make a run for it. Then all the soldiers left, but one, who took up a position at the gate. When the truck was gone and Charles’s black ministry car had rolled into the darkness behind it, the lone soldier strolled into the house and returned with a bottle of Woodrow’s whiskey. He lighted a cigarette from a fresh pack of Woodrow’s Dunhills, squatted down by the gate, and took a long pull from the bottle. The soldier saw me watching him from the patio and extended the bottle, offering me a drink. I shook my head no, no, no, and hurried inside to my children.

It all happened so fast that it hadn’t fully registered with me, until, halfway across the living room, my legs suddenly turned to water. The room spun, and I tipped and nearly fell to my knees. I reached out to break my fall with one hand on the cold tile floor, when from the tiny, dark laundry room at the rear of the house, Jeannine, trembling, gray faced, her eyes darting around the room, led the boys out.

They saw me and let go of Jeannine’s hands and tumbled towards me like baby birds falling from a nest. I caught them in my arms and pulled them close and stroked their heads, the four of us on the cold floor, tossed together in a tangled heap the same way we sometimes played mamma lion and her cubs in the cave, except this time, for the first time, the boys were terrified and crying, all three of them, and I was struggling not to cry myself, saying in a low, crooning voice, as if all four of us and also Jeannine had been wakened by the same nightmare, “They’re gone now, the soldiers have gone away, they’re gone and won’t be back, my darlings.”

The twins were quickly comforted and settled themselves peacefully against me, the nightmare over, but Dillon pulled away and, looking over my shoulder and around the room, said, “What about Papa? Where’s Papa?”

“He’ll be fine, Dillon. Don’t worry about Papa.”

“Why did the soldiers take him away?”

“He’ll be back soon. The leader wanted to speak with him, that’s all. Your papa is such an important man that the leader wanted to see him and couldn’t wait for tomorrow, that’s all, so he sent some of his own special soldiers to fetch him.”

Dillon looked at me with his steady, skeptical gaze. He knew I was lying, but accepted it, so as not to further frighten his younger brothers. I knew that, had we been alone, though barely seven years old, Dillon would have pushed me for the truth, or else a more complex and believable lie. That was his way. And possibly mine. Children are usually more concerned with justice than truth. And a strong lie sometimes gives as much strength to the one being lied to as to the liar.

The twins merely wanted comfort, not the truth. That was their way. Jeannine, too, wanted comfort, and accepted my reassurances with evident relief, clasping her hands together as if in prayer, although she surely knew that Woodrow, her uncle, her employer, her sometime lover, the man whose power had brought her out of the tribal village into this magically softened life in the city, the person on whom she depended utterly for safety, physical comfort, nourishment, even health, was in danger of losing all his power, possibly his life, and that therefore she, too, was in grave danger.

I disentangled myself from the boys and stood and helped them to their feet, tugged and straightened their pajamas, and kissed them each and in as normal a voice as I could manage told them to hurry along to bed now, it’s very late. “When they’re in bed, Jeannine,” I told her, “there’s broken glass on the patio.”

“Yes, m’am,” she said, and drew the boys to her and led them down the hall towards their bedroom. Then I remembered the dogs. Good Lord, the poor dogs! I walked to the door and looked out at their black bodies between the car and the gate, where the soldier squatted and drank Woodrow’s whiskey and smoked his Dunhills. If I left the house, I’d have to negotiate the space with him somehow. As long as I stayed inside, he’d stay outside. Better to send Jeannine for Kuyo tonight and ask him to come over to the compound right away and remove the bodies of the dogs and hose the blood away before the boys got up in the morning and, when they asked where are the dogs, Mammi? I’d have to lie again and say that Mr. Doe had admired them and wanted them to guard the presidential palace, and Papa had decided that it would be a nice thing to give the dogs to him. Wasn’t that nice of Papa?

All at once I seemed to be living a wholly different life from the one I’d been living barely an hour ago, with different rules, different intentions, and utterly different strategies for survival. I flopped down on the sofa, exhausted. What should I do? What could I do? I glanced at the telephone squatting on the table beside me and instantly decided to call Charles Taylor. It wasn’t exactly the next logical step, but I had no idea what was. Maybe Charles would say something that indirectly indicated where I should turn next; or maybe he would even tell me outright what I should do to save my husband. He surely was still Woodrow’s friend. My friend, too. Whatever he was doing tonight, it was against his will. He was acting on the leader’s orders, that’s all.

A quick search of Woodrow’s rolltop desk in the cubicle off the living room, and I had Charles’s home number. After a dozen rings, a woman picked up.

“Mist’ Taylor, him na home,” the woman whined, as if wakened from a deep sleep. One of Charles’s harem girls, I supposed.

“Fine, fine,” I said. “Ask him to call Mrs. Sundiata as soon as he returns. No matter how late,” I added, although I knew at once Charles would likely not get the message and, even if he did, would not call, not yet. I shouldn’t have called him. A mysterious and scary business was unfolding, and Charles was no mere messenger boy for the leader. There was more to come, surely. He owed me nothing anyhow. He was possibly in danger himself, and my call might have made things worse for him. At that time, I rather liked Charles Taylor. Of all Woodrow’s friends and colleagues, he was the most worldly and congenial, and in his relations with me he was downright charming. A ladies’ man, I’d decided, even before I learned of his harem, a claque of teenage girls and very young women, most of them from the backcountry, beautiful, interchangeable parts in Charles’s domestic life and rarely appearing with him outside his compound and never at a government function. I’d seen them mainly at his home, when visiting with Woodrow for drinks and dinner. They were gorgeously plumed birds kept in cages, nameless, for Charles never bothered to introduce them to me. One doesn’t introduce one’s servants to one’s dinner guests. Actually, they were more like groupies than servants. Charles had a rock star’s charisma and presence and generated a sexual force field that made him glow and allowed him to treat those who warmed themselves at his fire with benign neglect.

I’m not sure how benign it really was, though. Each time Woodrow and I visited Charles’s compound out on Caret Street, the girls I’d seen there previously had been replaced by new, younger girls, and I wondered what happened to the caged birds they’d replaced. Set free, flown back to the country? Not likely. More likely they’d become prostitutes, and were possibly now among those who entertained Woodrow and Charles and their friends and colleagues on those increasingly frequent nights when Woodrow didn’t come home from the ministry until dawn. I knew, of course, what went on. A wife always knows, and besides, this was Liberia, not Westchester County. After a while, when new birds appeared and boredom with the old ones set in, Charles probably just recycled the girls by passing them down the chain of command — first to the Assistant Minister of General Services, then to the Administrative Officer for the Ministry of General Services, on to the Director of the Office of Temporary Employment of General Services, all the way to the lowest clerk in the ministry, who could not afford to house or feed anyone but himself and family, and so the girl would turn to the soldiers or hit the streets, which amounted to the same thing.

All night long, I waited to hear from my husband — a phone call or, more likely, as I persisted in thinking, his actual return, angry and humiliated by his treatment at the hands of the leader and his one-time friend, Charles Taylor. You may prefer not to know this about me, but secretly, deep in the dark chambers of my many-chambered heart, Woodrow’s arrest pleased me. It wasn’t very wifely of me, I know, and it certainly was not in my best interests or my sons’, for we were as dependent on Woodrow as his niece Jeannine was. The entire household, even the chimps, were dependent on the man. He had insisted on it. It was, especially for Woodrow, the only way to live together, it was the African way, and all of us, Jeannine and Kuyo and I, had happily complied.

I sat there on the couch and considered my situation and how helpless I had suddenly become. I remembered my vows as a teenage girl and later as a grown woman never, never to become dependent on a man’s fate. I’d seen early on how it had paralyzed my mother, and from that vantage point, still a girl’s, I had looked ahead at what the world would offer me when I became a woman, and had pledged that I would take it only on my own terms. I would gladly accept from a man responsibility, commitment, recompense, and reward, but only if they were reciprocal and I were free to walk away from the man when and if he broke the contract or became a danger to me. The years in the Movement from college on had only reinforced this pledge, educating me as to its inextricable link to my personal freedom. I fought with my male classmates at Brandeis, who called me a bitch, a dyke, a cock-teasing, ball-busting feminist; and I argued with and sternly critiqued my male comrades in SDS and Weather, the boys who called themselves men and the women girls and said they really appreciated my contribution to the discussion, but let’s go back to my room and fuck and then you can make breakfast for me in the morning. Later, underground, I demanded of my cellmates total upfront clarity and agreement on splitting equally all financial, household, and childcare responsibilities and labor, even when the child was not mine and neither of the parents my lover.

Lord, all those vows, all those promises and contracts — broken, abandoned, nearly forgotten! Throughout the night, I lay in bed waiting for Woodrow’s return, for, all evidence to the contrary, I still believed that this was, at worst, another of the leader’s ways of intimidating and keeping loyal one of the most loyal members of his government. The other members of his government, more dangerous than Woodrow, had long since been disposed of. It was a move typical of Samuel Doe. He was famous for it. Arrest the man for a night, and send his best friend and fellow minister to do the job. It’ll keep the both of them in line.

While I waited, tossing restlessly beneath the gauzy mosquito netting, I let myself play out little scenarios, dimly lit fantasies that up to now I’d kept pretty much hidden from myself, like a secret stash of pornography tucked in the dark back corner of a closet. I saw myself settled in a small house, like the old Firestone cottage I’d lived in when I first arrived in Liberia, only with an extra bedroom for the boys to share, and located a few miles inland from Monrovia. The four of us would take care of the chimps, my dreamers. That’s all, a simple life. I’d school the boys at home, and I’d read to them at night, and they’d play with the children of the village, while I socialized with the other mothers, went to market with them, and cooked native food the native way on my own. A very simple life. Just me and the boys and the dreamers and the villagers and the jungle.

And when I grew tired of that fantasy, or it grew too complicated and was no longer sustainable, I envisioned a life here in town, a continuation of my present life, except that now Woodrow was no longer a part of my life, and I was free to be the white American woman with three brown sons living in the big white house on Duport Road with the view of the bay, the woman who ran the sanctuary for the chimpanzees, the woman with the mysterious past who could never return to her native land, who was occasionally seen at one of the better restaurants in town on the arm of an official from one of the European embassies, was sometimes mentioned in the society column of the Post as one of the guests at an embassy party. Or even, why not, seen dancing at a Masonic ball with Minister Charles Taylor. Which would indeed complicate things, no?

Fantasies of escape really are like pornography. They have to remain simple and untainted by reality, or they cause anxiety. I imagined myself and my sons, all three wearing small backpacks, Americans in Africa, as they board a plane at Robertsfield, leaving Liberia. Then here we are departing from the plane after it has landed at Logan Airport, in Boston. My mother and father, unchanged after all these years, greet us at the gate. Embraces and tears of joy and mutual forgiveness all around. No one else is there, except for other arriving passengers and the people waiting to greet them. No reporters covering the return of a one-time fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, the last of the Weather Underground come in from the cold. No U.S. Marshals or FBI agents to arrest me. No customs officer asking to see our passports and confiscating mine.

It would be simple, oh so simple, if Woodrow stayed arrested — stopped, frozen in time at this moment, and not jailed or tortured or beaten or killed, not shot dead by one of those iron-headed men with the AK-47s, big, cold-eyed men from the country. I didn’t want that. As I lay there in my bed and dawn light slid through the shuttered windows, as pepperbirds started their pre-morning ruckus, my tumbling fantasies gradually slowed and then, top-heavy with growing complexity, ceased to move. They buckled under the weight of reality and collapsed. Leaving me to contemplate the undeniable fact. My husband had been arrested by the most powerful man in the country, a man who, with impunity and without reason, was more than capable of killing him. And where would that leave me, me and my children?

BY DAWN THE SOLDIER guarding us had disappeared from the yard. And Jeannine and Kuyo, I discovered, had fled during the night — not until after Kuyo had removed the bodies of the dogs, I noticed, and Jeannine had swept up the broken glass. They’d gone back to Fuama, where, by noon, news of the arrest of Woodrow Sundiata, the village’s one big man in Monrovia, would have sent every member of Woodrow’s immediate family into hiding, where they’d stay for as long as it appeared that Woodrow was an enemy of the leader, even if it meant hiding in the bush for years or until the leader was overthrown and replaced.

I didn’t care, I was glad they were gone from the compound. Their presence, no matter how useful their service, oppressed me. Their role in my life, even after all these years, had never clarified itself. They weren’t servants or employees, nor were they family members, the kind you can count on in a crisis to provide aid and comfort. I didn’t know what they were, or who. They weren’t even hangers-on, the sort of people you can shoo away when they’ve become a burden or a bore.

So they were gone, and the house, for the first time since I moved into it, was empty. Fine, then; that settled it. I made a plan. It was more a piece of theater than a plan, however. In my life here, I had been acting in a play not of my making for so long that it was all I had. A role. As soon as I have fed the boys their breakfast, I’ll dress them the way Woodrow likes to see them, in blazers and ties, like little brown gentlemen enrolling at Choate, and I’ll dress myself accordingly in my long, white, chiffon dress and carry the silly, saffron-colored parasol and wear a soft, wide-brimmed hat against the sun, and with my sons in tow I’ll march into the leader’s office like a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara and demand the immediate release of my husband. After that, I’ll make up another little piece of theater and play it out. And then another, and if necessary, another.

When I had the boys fed and properly dressed, tasks I normally left to Jeannine, but not today, maybe not ever again, I telephoned Woodrow’s office. To my relief, Satterthwaite — Richard, as I now freely called him — answered. He’d already heard that his boss had been taken in the night by the leader’s security force. Richard was scared, I could tell by his shaky voice, usually so suavely controlled. He was sure that he was about to be arrested, too.

I told him not to be ridiculous, Woodrow would be released quickly, it was all a mistake and would be settled in a few hours. He partially believed me. I was the boss’s wife, after all. In reality, all I cared was that he make it possible for me and the boys to be driven to the leader’s door in a ministry car chauffeured by the minister’s personal assistant. It was in the script.

“The best thing you can do now,” I said to Richard, “if you want to keep your job in the ministry, is help me get Woodrow home quickly and safely. Which you can do by driving me and the boys directly to the presidential palace, as if no one has done anything wrong. Because no one has. Have they, Richard?”

“No. No one. Not Mister Sundiata, for sure,” he said.

“And certainly not you, Richard. The car is still here at the house, the soldiers left it. So come over here right away.”

THE BOYS AND I stepped one by one from the tinted interior of the Mercedes onto the white-gravel walkway to the ignominiously named White House, a faux plantation house with tall white columns and verandas, office and residential wings right and left, and tall windows and porticos — like a set for an antebellum movie, Mandingo maybe, or Roots.

“Wait for us here, Richard,” I said. “We shan’t be long.” I snapped open my parasol, lined the boys up behind me like ducklings, and marched up the wide steps to the guard box at the top, where I waved off the guard with a regal flip of my free hand, as if he had come forward to escort me in rather than to stop me, and kept moving. It was never done, but I was a woman, a white American woman, with her children, and so it was permitted. I and my three somber-faced boys, who must have been as much in awe at that moment of my queenly entitlement as of the colossal scale and splendor of the building that we seemed to have taken possession of, swept on unimpeded, all the way up the wide, curving, carpeted stairs to the second floor, through the outer office and past the startled secretaries to the antechamber of the office of the leader himself, where finally we were stopped, not by a member of the staff, but by a white man emerging from the inner sanctum just as I and my ducklings arrived at the wide, polished mahogany door.

It was Clement, Sam Clement, the fellow from the American embassy — in his early forties back then, fair haired and southern, a Princetonian with a tennis-court tan and the beginnings of a bourbon paunch, and wearing, just as you’d expect of our man in Africa, a rumpled, straw-colored, linen suit. I’d caught him by surprise, and he took a backwards step, recognizing me, and delivered his sweet, sad smile, a Virginia Tidewater all-purpose smile passed down in the family, father to son for generations.

“Why, hel-lo, Dawn!” he said, putting lead-footed emphasis on the name, as if to remind me that he still remembered my real name and, while I might fool the natives, I was no mystery to him. “Missus Sundiata,” he added.

I gave him a curt nod and pushed past and through the doorway. “I’m here to see the leader,” I announced and entered the large, bright, sunlit room. I brought the boys to my side now, clustering them around me, and heard the door snap shut behind us as if with smug satisfaction, and faced the leader, who stood behind his desk, a small, tight smile on his lips. He grows larger every time I see him, I said to myself. Taller, wider, thicker, like a hippopotamus.

“Miz Sundiata,” he pronounced, as if announcing my arrival at a formal ball, then chuckled. He may be illiterate, an ignorant pig of a man, but he knows how to play the chieftain, I thought. He clasped his hands below his chin and looked us over like a judge about to issue his verdict. He wore a double-breasted, dark gray suit, bright white shirt and paisley tie, with a floppy silk handkerchief dangling from his breast pocket. “Wife of the esteemed Minister Woodrow Sundiata. And his sons, too, I see,” he added and smiled down at them.

I knew I had only a little time before he grew impatient with the occasion and had me removed. “President Doe, what are the conditions of my husband’s release?”

His eyebrows rose into his forehead, then lowered, and his round face darkened from brown to nearly black. I half-expected smoke to blow from his nostrils and ears, his eyes to glow red as coals, and I drew my children closer to me. “You in naw place fe’makin’ demands, Missy!” he told me, lapsing into pidgin, speaking rapidly, almost losing me. Because I knew the subject and could read his emotions from his face, I was able to follow him adequately and look for openings. He told me that my husband was a traitor and a thief. A bad man, top to bottom. Not fit to be the father of these beautiful boys or the husband of a nice lady like me.

“Me curse de name of de man!” the leader of Liberia declared, and he spat on the vast Oriental carpet.

My sons grabbed the folds of my dress and moved tightly against me. They knew now that I had lied to them last night. Papa was not the friend of the leader after all. I’d probably lied about the dogs, too. And much else. I calmly stroked their heads and waited for the exhibition, for I knew that’s what it was, to run its course. The man ranted, he roared, he glowered and lowered his voice to a weird whisper, then roared again. This was his theater, his play, too, and he loved it.

I began to catch the gist of his complaint. Over one million dollars had been secretly extracted—“Em-bezzled!” he kept repeating, as if he’d just learned the word. The money had been taken from funds allocated to the General Services Agency by the State Department of the United States of America. It was money that had been embezzled, therefore, from the generous citizens of the United States. And did I know who was in charge of the Liberian General Services Agency? Did I? Of course I knew! Charles Taylor, my husband’s closest friend and ally, was in charge of the General Services Agency! Over one million dollars, one-point-four million U.S. dollars, to be exact, were missing from the books, gone, fled the country, probably in Switzerland in a secret bank account in the name of Charles Taylor and Woodrow Sundiata, waiting to be wired back to each of their separate accounts here in Monrovia as soon as they thought no one was looking for it anymore!

“But dat naw goin’ t’ happen,” he solemnly declared. “It naw goin’ fe’ take place,” he said, and then suddenly returned to speaking English and was calm again, as if the two languages determined his emotions rather than served them. “You want your husband freed, Missus Sundiata?” he asked.

“I do. Of course.”

“No problem.” He strode to his wide, mahogany desk, an ornate Victorian box, its top entirely free of paper, with a box of Cuban cigars, a chrome martini shaker, and a red telephone on it. He picked up the receiver and without dialing said just two words, “Release Sundiata.” And hung up. “See? No problem,” he beamed.

“Then why … why did you arrest him?”

“To flush out the bad man, Charles Taylor. His co-conspirator.” He kissed the word.

“And…?”

“Your husband a good boy. Too bad me didn’ think t’ grab him sooner, though, because ol’ Charles Taylor, him gone out of the country now. Skee-da-delled. Wal, not quite. He be halfway ’cross the ocean now. But when him land in New York City,” the president said, smiling broadly at the thought, “there be a big surprise waitin’ for him.”

“Aha!” I said. “That’s why Mister Clement was here.” I pictured Sam Clement calling his superiors in Washington, ordering the arrest and detention of a Liberian national arriving from Monrovia this afternoon at JFK. I said, “You are a sly fox, Mister President. And my husband? What about him?”

“Nuttin’. He give me what me want. Now me give him what him want.”

“Which is…?”

He herded me and my sons towards the door. “You ask him yourself, missus, when he come home today. G’wan home now, or him be there before you. G’wan home,” he said. “An’ pack your suitcase,” he added and closed the door solidly behind me.

WOODROW AND I were alone for the first time all afternoon and evening. Finally. He stood in his shirt and loosened necktie and white undershorts and socks, carefully placing his suit jacket and slacks on hangers and into the closet, a tumbler of scotch and ice on the dresser next to him. I sat on the bed, brushing out my hair, and watched him slowly, delicately, almost lovingly, remove and hang his clothes — a man of bottomless vanity. He’d been holding court with relieved friends and neighbors in the living room for hours and was a little drunk. The boys were asleep in bed, Jeannine and Kuyo were back, and except for the dogs, everything seemed to have returned to normal. Throughout the day, since his release, friends and relatives had been dropping by, as if on a casual, neighborly visit, to verify the truth of what they had heard, that Woodrow Sundiata had been arrested by the leader, held for a night, and released unharmed, a sequence almost unheard of in Liberia in those years. Even more unusual, he had kept his old position as minister. The leader was telling people he’d made a mistake. Woodrow was a good boy; Charles Taylor was the bad man, and him the Americans had arrested in New York, caught fleeing the country. Unfortunately, millions of dollars were still missing from the General Services fund, and only Charles Taylor knew where the money was hidden.

That was not true, of course, and no one believed it. Samuel Doe owned Woodrow now, just as he owned the one-point-four million U.S. dollars that, according to Woodrow, Charles Taylor had siphoned off the General Services fund, transferred to the Barclay’s Bank on Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then carried back in cash in a ministry briefcase when returning to Monrovia from a Caribbean holiday with one of his lady friends. He’d stashed the cash in a safe-deposit box controlled by Woodrow and Charles at the Barclay’s in Monrovia. Now, thanks to Woodrow, President Doe had the cash in his safe deposit box, and Charles Taylor would soon disappear into an American prison. My husband, I knew, would henceforth be like one of the president’s pet bonobo apes, only a little bit free, with a short chain clamped to his thin ankle. I could not believe his stupidity.

“So, you did steal the money. You and Charles.”

“No, no, not at all. Charles did that. Charles was the culprit,” Woodrow said and gently bit his lower lip, as if his mind were elsewhere. He picked up his glass and took a sip of his drink. “I was merely looking into the General Services budget for a little help from the American aid for my own programs. Help I need and deserve, but that the Americans never see fit to provide. They prefer roads to medicines, you know.”

“Yes, Woodrow, I know.” I didn’t believe him. I studied his hairless legs and wondered anew why they were so scrawny, almost as if he’d had a terrible, wasting disease as a child that he refused to tell me about. And he’d grown thick and soft around the middle in the last few years, making his legs seem even skinnier than they were. I was sure that he and Charles had schemed together to steal as much as they could for as long as they could — it was part of a Liberian government minister’s job description, practically. And I knew that, once arrested, Woodrow had betrayed Charles, who had skee-da-delled. Then Woodrow had purchased his own release by turning over the stolen U.S. funds, now safely in cash currency and part of Samuel Doe’s burgeoning secret treasury, his French Riviera retirement fund. I figured that the leader’s original plan, to have Charles and Woodrow betray each other, hadn’t quite worked. Charles must not have implicated Woodrow, or they’d both be either dead or lying battered and broken in some hut in the bush. Charles, uncharacteristically for a Liberian, had refused to play by the rules of the game. But it had all turned out fine for the leader, since he’d ended up with the money in one pocket and the health minister in the other and Charles, the bad one, the hard one, the dangerous one, tucked away in an American jail many thousands of miles from Liberia. Better than killing them.

“You turned over the money to Samuel Doe, then?”

“No, not exactly. I merely knew where it was located.”

“Oh.”

“You’re angry with me?”

“Oh, no, of course not!” I snapped. “You realize, of course, what you’ve risked? And how it might have affected me and the boys? And still may? What were you thinking?”

“Please. This whole mess has been Charles Taylor’s doing, not mine,” he said.

“Well, yes, you’re free, and Charles’s not, and you still have your job. So I guess that proves it,” I said, suddenly feeling a little bit sorry for him. Also, I was exhausted and wanted to sleep, not argue. Then, when I turned my face up to his, I saw that he was terrified. He took a hard swallow from his drink and closed his eyes tightly, then opened them wide, as if hoping the world had changed. I remember thinking, He won’t live out the year.

He did, of course, manage to live out that year and the following seven, too, and he lived them rather well, both with and without me at his side. But at that moment, to me he was a dead man, and I had already begun preparing my grief, for I knew that it would require a certain amount of conscious, willful preparation. I did not love him anymore, if I ever had, and I would not miss him. But I didn’t want him to suffer, and I still needed him. Needed him for my sons and, to a lesser degree, for myself.

“There is, however, one condition that the president has set for my freedom,” Woodrow said in a low voice. He kept his gaze averted from me and unbuttoned his shirt very slowly, as if wanting it to last a long time. “If you can call it that, freedom.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. In exchange for the information he wanted, I asked the leader for safe passage out of the country for you and the boys.”

“Out of the country? Why?”

“To get you out of danger. But he said—”

“What danger are we in?” I demanded, very loudly, cutting him off.

He inhaled deeply and, inflated with slight disgust, looked down at me, as if he thought me a fool. “Because, Hannah, this country is no longer as safe as it once was for the wife of Woodrow Sundiata. And since I myself cannot leave without permission from the leader…”

“There’s a condition for your so-called freedom?”

“Yes. There is.”

“And…?”

“You.”

“Me? I’m the condition?”

“In a sense, yes. He wants you out of the country.”

“My God,” I laughed. “Why?”

Exasperated, Woodrow sighed, as if thinking that I just didn’t get it. Women, American women especially, do not understand how the real world works. “Hannah darling, Samuel Doe probably believes that your presence here makes it more difficult for him to control me than if you were not here. If you were a Liberian woman, instead of…”

“It’s not a problem if I’m just another village girl, right?”

“Well, yes, quite right. You’re a complication, let us say. He’s a little bit afraid of you. Of you and who you know and who knows you.” Again he loudly sighed, a man who dreaded what was coming next.

“And the boys? What about them?”

“I’m sorry. They can’t go with you.”

“I must go, but my sons can’t go? That’s it? What the hell are you talking about? Who says this?”

“He says it. Doe. The president.”

“Why?” I screamed at him, and it felt very good. I almost never shout, and I never scream.

“Because the boys’ presence will help him control me.”

“Whereas my presence will have the opposite effect.”

“Exactly.”

“Woodrow, please! This is insane! Besides, where does Samuel Doe think I can go on my own? If I go back to the States, I’ll be arrested as soon as I get off the plane, just like Charles. And he can’t expect me to leave my children behind!”

“No, it’s not insane. It’s coldly sane, very calculated, very shrewd. President Doe knows exactly what he’s doing. And you won’t be arrested when you get to the States. That won’t happen. The Americans have agreed that you are not Hannah Musgrave. You are who your passport says you are, my dear. You are Dawn Carrington.”

“Sam Clement’s part of this, then. And my sons? What will happen to them without me?”

“They’re my sons, too. And they’ll be fine with me and Jeannine and my people. Until I can arrange to send them to you, which really shouldn’t be all that long a wait. I can’t speak of it yet, but Samuel Doe is not president for life, you know. This is just something that we’re going to have to do, regardless of what we might prefer to do. Things will change.”

“How long … before things change?”

“I don’t know. Not long. A year. Two, maybe more. Although I hope not.”

It seemed unreal, unfair, and altogether unexpected. I certainly hadn’t desired it, but once put in front of me like this — once it was clear to me that I would have to abandon my husband and children and return alone to the United States, once I saw that I would be alone, safe from prosecution — I realized, gradually at first and then in a rush, that it was exactly what I had wanted all along.

I was being severed from my African husband and torn from my African sons. I was being released from my obligation to care for the chimps. And I had no choice! It was all being forced upon me by my husband’s stupidity and weakness and by the Liberian leader’s greed and paranoiac need to maintain control over his subjects, and by the American government’s desire to use the Republic of Liberia as a chip in a game with stakes too high to bother chasing down a middle-aged, one-time member of the Weather Underground traveling on a phony passport.

I’m not making excuses, I’m just trying to tell you the truth as I understand it now, not as I understood it then. At the time, I didn’t realize that I was once again seizing an opportunity to abandon one life for another. I thought I loved Africa, my new and, compared with my homeland, relatively innocent country. And although I knew that I was not in love with my husband, I thought that I was loyal to him. And my sons — I did love them, but I was not a woman for whom motherhood was a fulfilling, natural role. I’m still not. It’s always been an act. It was only with the chimps that I felt like a natural mother, but I did not love them individually and for themselves, the way I did my sons. I was only leaving my sons temporarily, I told myself. I may have been acting there, too, but I was playing before an empty house. In all my relations with both my sons and the chimps there was a disjunct, a powerful, buried conflict that made it possible for me to abandon both with such remarkable and awful ease that today, when I look back on it, I’m ashamed. I would try to make amends later and promised myself that I would return to all of them, to Africa, to my husband, my sons, and my chimps, and would never leave them again.

Finally, he was undressed. Standing naked before me, he finished his drink, then lit the mosquito coil, snapped off the light, and slipped into bed. When I followed and was lying on my back beneath the top sheet, he flopped an arm across my belly and pressed his face against my breasts, his signal that he wanted sex.

“No, Woodrow. Not tonight,” I said as gently as I could manage.

“Really?” he said, mildly surprised and disbelieving.

“Really.”

“As you wish, then.” He was silent for a moment. “It may be your last chance for a long, long time, you know.”

“Oh, Lord, Woodrow,” I said, turning to him, and smiled into the darkness at the gods of sex who knew everything I knew and more. I felt Woodrow stiffen against my thigh and took him into my arms.

I WOKE JUST before dawn with a boulder of rage lodged in the middle of my chest and a desire to break someone’s skull with it. But I didn’t know whose head to aim it at. Woodrow lay snoring beside me, a secondary target. I shoved his bare shoulder. He blinked slowly several times and yawned like a house cat, all teeth and tongue.

“I’m going to wake the boys and tell them,” I said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Tell them? Now?” He licked and smacked his lips. “We’ll tell them together. It’s better that way.”

“No. I’d rather do it alone.” I pushed the pale shroud of mosquito netting aside and left the bed and in the cool half-darkness began to dress.

“What will you say to them?” he called.

“Oh, you needn’t worry, Woodrow. I won’t tell them the truth. I’ll lie. I’ll protect you. I’ll even protect the president.”

“How? What will you say to them? They’re too young to understand.”

“Yes. Well, so am I,” I said. “I don’t know, I’ll make it up, for Christ’s sake.”

“Please, Hannah, don’t swear. Is there coffee? I don’t smell it.”

“It’s too early. No one else is up. Not even Jeannine,” I said, and swept from the room, righteous and wrathful. It was an act, however, sweeping from the room. The boulder of rage still weighed me down. I may talk to my husband with rare animation and force, I may look swift to him, perhaps even graceful; but I felt inside as if I were pushing the words and my body through pudding.

I strode past Jeannine’s cubicle and with customary but useless irritation noted that the door was shut (“What if they woke in the night and needed you, Jeannine? What if they needed you to kill a snake?”) and entered the boys’ room. The curtains were drawn, but even in the dark I knew where everything was located and strode through the small, cluttered room as if the lights were on. Their three small cots were positioned side by side along the far wall, as in a barracks. Wheeled toys, trucks and tractors and excavators, lay scattered about the room. Stacks of picture-books, balls and bats, and Dillon’s plastic guns were everywhere, and crayon drawings like primitive graffiti, a map of the world, and photos of African animals cut from old copies of National Geographic were taped to the walls. In corners and atop the dressers lay piles of clothes, sneakers, and costumes and dishes and plastic cups from bedtime snacks. It was the overstocked bedroom of pampered and privileged little boys from anywhere in the Western world. I could make out only outlines in the shadowed room, but all their stuff, here in the heart of equatorial Africa, suddenly looked weirdly out of place to me, as if it belonged instead in a suburb of Boston. I was already starting to disappear from my sons’ real, everyday life, as if going underground again.

From a block away came the first call of a backyard rooster. Doves gulped and gurgled on the dew-wet grass just outside the window, and palm fronds nicked one another in the soft, offshore breeze. Up close, I saw that Dillon was awake. He stared at me through the gauzy netting, expressionless, as if he’d been anticipating my arrival and I’d arrived late. The twins in their cots lay sleeping in identical parallel positions, facing the wall away from me and from the world at large.

I drew back the netting and sat down on the edge of Dillon’s narrow bed. “You’re awake early,” I said and stroked his cool, bare arm. He said nothing and continued gazing at the spot by the door that I had filled seconds ago, as if an afterimage lingered there — my fading white shadow. Without getting up, I reached with both hands to the twins’ cots, brushed the netting away, and gently held each boy’s ankle, waking the two as if waking one. They turned, rubbed their eyes, sat up in tandem, and smiled.

Paul and William, though not delicate or fragile, were small for their age, almost preternaturally quiet, and except with one another, kept their own council. From infancy the twins had remained a mystery to me, unlike Dillon, who seemed more and more to resemble the child I had been. Paul dominated his brother William, as one twin always will, but gently, politely, and neither was shy or insecure. Paired, the two more than made up for their lack of size and loquacity and made a fiercely combative team, especially when threatened by their older brother. He, on the other hand, was tall for his age, rangy and prematurely muscled. Dillon was a natural athlete and was already, at seven, the size of a boy of ten. Woodrow had recently enrolled him in twice-a-week tennis lessons and had begun asking me about colleges in the United States where a boy could learn to play “top-level tennis.”

Princeton, I’d guessed. Probably Stanford. But how on earth would I know? I demanded. Wasn’t he being a little premature? The boy was barely seven, for heaven’s sake. Which Woodrow had laughed off, noting that his parents and mine had set us upon our paths as early as five or six, had they not? And unless we wanted our sons simply to follow in their father’s footsteps, we would have to show them right from the beginning a different and better way of life. We did not want our sons to follow the same path as their father, did we? Not that there was anything wrong with that path, of course. Woodrow simply felt that his sons should rise above their father — above their mother as well, I assumed — to the same degree as he had risen above his.

Maybe Woodrow’s dream of his handsome brown sons playing tennis at Princeton was no less realistic than any other. They had advantages he’d barely dreamed of, after all. They were the sons of an educated, high-up city man. They were half American, their mother from a “good” American family. They were half white. Sometimes, when sitting up late and in his cups, he would declare, “My sons will be very big men in the big world! Captains of industry, Hannah! Head of the United Nations! Presidents! Big men!”

It was more a promise than a prediction, as if it were up to him. I wondered what broken-promised path we were setting his sons on now. His sons? My sons. It was a faint and overgrown path, winding both into the jungle and out of it, and we had no map to give them, no way to guess where it led. I was about to abandon my boys, to leave them in the care of this weak Christian man, their poor father, confused and self-divided, who had recently become a barely tolerated enemy of the state, and his extended family, hopelessly impoverished, powerless people whose language and culture were to me so far beyond exotic as to be practically meaningless and unintelligible. What clearing in the jungle would these people find for my little boys? And what guiding role in their future lives would I play now? I had only Woodrow’s vague assurance that soon I would be able to rejoin them, either here or in the United States. But how soon? It all depended on the life expectancy, political or otherwise, of Samuel Doe, the unpredictable and treacherous president of the Republic of Liberia — an eventuality that neither I nor Woodrow could effect in the slightest.

I had never left my sons for longer than a single day and was as new at this as they. I told myself that I had no choice in the matter, none, and quickly hardened wholly into stone. To my freshly wakened, still sleepy little boys, I said, “I’m going to have to go away for a time and leave you with Papa and Jeannine.”

Dillon turned to the window, as if seeking a way out of the moment without having to push past me. The twins opened their eyes wide and made little Os with their mouths and at once turned for an explanation, not to me, but to each other. None of the three could look at me. I said that the president wanted me to go back to the United States for a visit, but he couldn’t let them or Papa go with me just yet — Papa because his work for the government was too important, and them because they were Papa’s sons and, like him, were Liberians. I knew it made no sense to them, but couldn’t think of an adequate lie. Because the truth made no sense, I wanted them to hear it, as if by punishing them with nonsense I were somehow punishing their father. “It’s not my fault,” I said. “I would like to stay here, or else take you with me. But the president won’t let me. The president is a very strange man,” I told them. “He thinks if I’m not here with you and Papa, he’ll be able to keep Papa working for him and not helping the people who are against him. That’s silly, of course, but it’s what he believes, and he’s the president. And he thinks if you go to America with me, then Papa will want to go, too.”

With his back to me, Dillon asked “Will you come back someday?”

“Someday? Of course! And it won’t be someday. It’ll be soon, as soon as possible.”

“Okay, then. Go ahead,” he said. He slipped out of his bed and in tee shirt and shorts, barefoot, headed for the door, and was gone. The twins watched him leave and began to get out of their beds to follow.

I said, “What about you two? Is it all right with you, that I have to go away for a while?”

They stopped by the door and turned back and smiled sweetly, both of them, as if they’d already discussed the subject and had reached an easy agreement. Paul said, “Yes, Mammi. It’s all right. You can go.” Both twins waved goodbye to me, and ran to catch up to their brother.

When you part with someone you love, there’s usually an aura of grief attached. But saying goodbye has never been difficult for me. I do it quickly and with little felt emotion, until afterwards, when I’m by myself and it’s done and it’s too late for any feelings that might slow or clog my departure. I sat at the foot of my eldest son’s rumpled, empty bed alongside the two empty beds of his brothers and saw that for the first time in nearly eight years I was alone again. And for the first time since the day I went underground, I felt strong and free.

The room slowly filled with hazy gray morning light, gradually bringing into sharp focus the clutter of the boys’ toys and clothing, all the defining props and evidence of their ongoing existence. Though I had been the one to clip and tape the pictures, maps, and drawings to the walls, the boys had chosen them. And though I had purchased most of their possessions, it was with money given me by their father. To my eyes, there was nothing of mine in that room, no evidence that I existed.

MY LEAVE-TAKING from Liberia in 1983 went nearly as unremarked as my arrival had back in 1975. I packed my old duffel and said my goodbyes quickly and easily, as if flying to Freetown or Dakar for a holiday weekend with friends. The boys, naturally, were afraid they were being abandoned by their mother, but they could not admit it, even to one another.

The night before I left, Sam Clement dropped by the house on his way home from the embassy, to wish me bon voyage, he said, and to reassure me that he’d keep an eye on my boys, including Woodrow (wink wink), until I got back, when in fact he was merely making sure that I knew that my departure from the country was under the protection and in the interests of official U.S. policy towards Liberia and the administration of President Doe.

Later, the president himself telephoned to say that he hoped I had a “superb” holiday in America and used the word superb, his new word of the week, I guessed, twice more, in reference to my sons and to characterize my company, which he said would be very much missed during the upcoming national holiday. As an expression of his personal affection for me, he was providing Woodrow with a bit of a cash bonus to help pay my travel expenses and would send it to me via Woodrow’s trusty assistant, Satterthwaite.

Woodrow, who left early for the ministry the next morning and did not see me off later, was clearly relieved to have me gone from his household — it was saving his life, after all — but had to say that he would miss me terribly. Then Satterthwaite arrived with the car around three that afternoon and handed me the packet given to him at the office by Woodrow. It contained my one-way ticket to JFK and an envelope with fifty crisp, one-hundred-dollar bills inside. Satterthwaite looked at the ground and said to me, “I hope you come back soon-soon, Miz Sundiata,” but I knew he was thinking, Damn good t’ing dis bitch finally outa here, ’cause someday her gonna get mad at de ol’ man an’ tell ’im what we done once way back den an’ mek de ol’ man fire me or wuss.

Jeannine stood woefully at the front gate as Satterthwaite drove me from the yard, tears running down her round, brown face, her fingers crossed in a behind-the-back hex designed to keep me from ever coming back, making the house hers, my children hers, my husband and his wealth and power hers.

No one else took account of my departure from Liberia that day. It happened so quickly, of course, that there was little occasion for a farewell party or visits with the half-dozen or so people in Monrovia whom I counted as friends. And they weren’t really friends, anyhow — merely acquaintances, the wives of Woodrow’s colleagues and business associates. Elizabeth and Benji, who had been running the lab on their own for the last seven years, were not my friends, though I knew them well and had seen them nearly every day on my visits with my dreamers. The university had not bothered to replace me after I left my post as clerk of the works and had withdrawn all but minimal support for the project, providing only enough funding to keep the chimps caged and alive. This was before AIDS research had gotten under way in earnest, when a new reason would arise to infect the animals with disease and monitor their reactions. If they’d been allowed to do it, the university officials would have had the animals put down, cheaper than releasing them to the wild and easier on the animals, most of whom had been traumatized by capture and confinement and had gone through a simian version of the Stockholm syndrome and had so thoroughly substituted their captors’ desires for their own that they were incapable of living naturally in the wild.

Early the morning of the day I left Monrovia, even before packing my bag, I went out to the lab, ostensibly to say goodbye to Elizabeth and Benji, but actually it was for a final visit with the chimps, for, without my ongoing vigilance, I did not think they would live long under their keepers’ care. The machinery that paid Elizabeth and Benji their monthly salaries was permanently in place, it seemed, and did not depend on there being any chimpanzees in those cages. Corruption thrives on process, not product, so it didn’t matter to them or anyone else if the chimps starved or sickened and died, if the cages one by one were emptied out, because Elizabeth and Benji would still be paid by the American university for maintaining its research facility and animal subjects in Liberia, and the university would still be paid by the multinational pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey, and the pharmaceutical company, through tax write-offs and federal grants, would still be paid by the American citizenry. Though I had come dangerously close to loving the product, the dreamers caged in a Quonset hut out at the edge of the city, I was merely a witness to the process, helpless to change it at any level.

I rode out on my bicycle, as had long been my habit, and as usual no one was at the lab. Elizabeth’s and Benji’s routines had long since been reduced to showing up twice a day for only as long as it took to feed the chimps and hose down the floor of the Quonset hut and conduct whatever little side business the two ran out of the all-but-defunct lab. They had sold off piecemeal most of the office furniture and the household goods and furnishings from the three cottages — after taking as much of it as they wanted for their own use — and were renting out the cottages on an hourly basis, I suspected, for I had on several occasions seen strangers, men with women, arriving and leaving at odd and unlikely hours. I never entered the cottages to see for myself who was living or working there — prostitutes, I assumed — and never confronted or quizzed Elizabeth or Benji about the use they were making of the compound.

They could strip it bare, for all I cared, or trash it or turn a profit from it any way they wanted. I had no loyalty to the university that financed the project and did not believe in the purposes for which the facility had been established in the first place. To me, it was a prison whose inmates had been deranged first by the circumstances of their capture and then by their lifelong confinement, inmates rendered incapable of functioning outside their cells, kept there now solely for their own safety. I made sure that they were properly fed and watered twice a day — either by Elizabeth and Benji or, if they didn’t show up, by me — and that their cages were washed down, and when on occasion one of the chimps injured itself or fell ill, I nursed it back to health, and, as happened several times over the years, if one of them died from an undiagnosed illness or simply from sadness, I buried the poor creature out behind the Quonset hut and erected a wooden marker with the dreamer’s name painted on it, Hooter and Livingston and Marcie. And grieved.

The dreamers had come to trust me, to welcome my twice-daily arrival with a joyful chorus of pant-hoots and hand-claps. We communed together, usually for an hour, sometimes more, in the mornings after my sons had been washed and fed at home and dressed for the day and placed in Jeannine’s care, and again in the late afternoon, when it had begun to cool and I did not mind riding my bike out to the compound and back, a thirty-minute ride each way that took me to the edge of the city and the beginning of the jungle. My time with the dreamers was the most peaceful, restorative two hours of the day for me, and I had quickly become dependent on the visits for what little peace of mind I had then. Without it, I feared I would come undone, for, despite the leisurely pace and apparent stability of my daily life as wife and mother, that life felt fragile, as if it were someone else’s and at any moment I would be exposed as a fraud, a counterfeit wife and mother, not at all who I seemed or claimed to be. And not anyone whom I knew, either. It was only when alone with the dreamers that I knew myself.

In those years, there were, as there is now, a large number of baby chimps being bought and sold illegally on the streets of Monrovia and in the marketplaces all over West Africa and many more babies being captured and smuggled out to labs in Europe and North America. I knew about this terrible trade, knew that to capture a single baby in the wild it was first necessary to shoot its mother and as many as three or four of the other adults who always tried to protect the baby from the human beings. Over the years, whenever I came upon one of the little wide-eyed, terrified creatures locked in a tiny cage or at the end of a chain in the market or alleyway, I purchased it myself, and after nursing it back to health, for the babies I bought were almost always malnourished and swarming with parasites, carried it out to the compound, where, with a terrible sadness, I imprisoned it with the others.

A baby chimp cannot survive alone in the forest, and I had no way of returning it to its lost and probably scattered and decimated family. The best I could do for it was provide a less cruel form of imprisonment and deprivation than the one that would lead inevitably to an early death. Baby chimps are like young humans, playful and clever and eager to please, and they respond to kindness with delight and gratitude. But after a few years they become troublesome, hormone-fueled adolescents and then adults, very powerful, willful, and highly intelligent creatures for whom the human order of things is perceived as a challenge, a regime to be overthrown. An adult male chimpanzee can weigh as much as an adult male human and is five times as strong and capable of extreme violence against objects and other animals, including human animals and its fellow chimps. When a pet baby or even a laboratory chimp becomes an adult, unless it is caged, it is almost always executed, killed simply for being itself.

In purchasing the babies I came across in the marketplace and locking them into a prison, I was saving their lives. But for what? Every time I walked along the rows of cages and pushed melons, bananas, cucumbers, and armloads of greens through the bars or passed the food directly into the hand reaching through the bars towards me, every time I returned the direct, deep-water gaze of the dreamers in my charge, and every time we spoke together, they in their language, and I in mine, I asked myself, why can’t I set them free? Lord knows, I wanted to do it, and hundreds of times I imagined doing it, simply unlocking the cages and taking them by the hand — for all of them now let me hold hands with them, and we even groomed one another — I would lead them under cover of darkness to the edge of the forest and there let go of their hands and turn and walk alone back into the city.

But it was too late for that. They were like ruined children, incapable of surviving on their own. Humans and chimpanzees have to be taught by their kith and kin how to be a human or a chimpanzee, how to find proper food and shelter, how to relate to others of its species in ways that are mutually useful and satisfying, how to reproduce, how to care for the young and the old and infirm — or else we perish as a species. Every chimp in my care had been captured as a baby and had been confined for its entire life so far, and did not know, therefore, how to be itself. And I had made myself the warden of their prison, and by default had become their caretaker and had made them dependent on me for their food and shelter and protection from the humans who would as soon neglect them and let them starve and die in their own filth as sell the babies for pets and kill the adults and sell their bodies for meat, their hands and heads for souvenirs. And now I was about to abandon them.

They greeted me that morning with their usual clamor and applause and loud declarations of hunger and thirst, which I quickly satisfied. Neither Elizabeth nor Benji had shown up yet and possibly wouldn’t arrive till evening, if at all, but I had arranged with Woodrow to have our yardman, Kuyo, who had developed an affection for the chimps, replace me as caretaker. Woodrow promised me that he would see to this, but I carried his promise to Kuyo myself, to impress upon him the seriousness of the job. Starting this very evening, I told him, his job as yardman would include purchasing the chimps’ food in the marketplace once a week and feeding them and washing down the floor of the Quonset hut twice daily. Woodrow’s office paid for the food from the general fund supplied by the grant from NYU, the same fund that paid Elizabeth’s and Benji’s salaries every month. Kuyo said he’d like that. “The monkeys-dem, we come to be friends now for a long-long time.” I felt, therefore, replaceable in the lives of my dreamers. But were they replaceable in mine? I wasn’t sure. Everyone else in my life, even my children, saw me as replaceable. Somehow I felt that in my sons’ eyes, just as in Woodrow’s, I had become extraneous to their lives, merely a witness, a sympathetic bystander. To Jeannine I was a pretender to the throne. To everyone in Liberia who knew me I was Woodrow Sundiata’s white American wife. I was a woman whose absence would barely be noticed.

Except by the dreamers. When I was no longer there mornings and afternoons with armloads of food and plenty of fresh water and kindly murmurings and filial touches on the hand and arm, they would know I had left them. And they would miss my pale shadow on the far side of the bars greeting their dark shadows, my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves, revealing to me and to them the face of our ancient, common ancestral mother, caught and given shape here and now in her descendants’ mirrored gaze. The dreamers and I took each other out of the specificity of personal time and physiognomy. When in their presence I was in sacred time and space, and they were, too. I was convinced of it.

I know how this probably sounds to you, but I don’t care. Any more than a born-again Christian cares what she sounds like when she tells an atheist of her personal relationship with an itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. There are parallels between my meetings with the chimpanzees and the Christian’s encounter with Christ. When I first saw the dreamers, like a Christian touched by her savior, I wept uncontrollably. Later, through the daily rituals associated with caring for them, like any steadfast acolyte, I gradually got myself close enough to see them for what they truly were, a gate that led me straight to that ancestral mother. The spirit of the river, the one they call Mammi Watta.

I tell you this even though I know you might think it little more than spiritual bilge, a weird form of New-Age hogwash, because I’ve come to trust your kind patience and open-mindedness. I’m not a conventionally religious woman. I’m not religious at all. But until the dreamers entered my life, I was locked into a material world whose only exit lay in an imagined future, a utopian fantasy. Until I met the dreamers, I was stuck with a mere ideology of exit.

Slowly I walked from cage to cage, as if passing along the stations of the cross, with my head slightly bowed, my teeth carefully covered, hands loose at my sides, and the dreamers quieted one by one and silently watched me, babies and adults alike. I said to them in a low murmur, I’m leaving you today and do not know when I will return. And I pray that this is a riskier, more worrisome thing for me than it will be for you. And I pray that in my absence neither of us will fall back to being what we were before. That we not become imprisoned isolates. That we not become monads. That we not become as we were, motherless brothers and sisters unable to recognize one another as kin. I passed along the cages, and when I returned to my starting point, repeated my slow walk and said the prayer again, and did it a third time, making of it a ritual act. And then I bowed my head and backed slowly out of the building into the glare of sunlight and closed and locked the heavy door behind me.