I could not absorb what I was seeing. It had no meaning. The scene bewildered me, as if it had been contrived by a species other than human, a species as clever as ours, as organized and rational, but demonic. I stood a few feet inside the doorway and stared at the dark faces of the chimpanzees, and I couldn’t stop myself, I suddenly began to weep. I cried for them, certainly, their pain and suffering, and then I wept for the humans who had imprisoned them. And then I felt my stomach knot and unknot, and in confusion I cried for myself. When, suddenly, I felt a touch on my shoulder. The dead weight of a hand. I glanced at my shoulder and saw a black hand with long, slender fingers lying there, and I leapt away from it.
“Ah, forgive me, Hannah. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
It was Woodrow — Mr. Sundiata to me then — facing me with a benign smile. It was the dark-brown face of the man whom in a few short months I would marry, the man whose three sons, in less than two years, I would bear. The husband whom I would deceive and abandon and to whom I would later return. The man who would betray and forsake me and who would later beg for my forgiveness and receive it. The man who would be chopped down and killed before my eyes. You may not believe me, but in those few brief seconds I saw what was coming. It was as if in the darkened room of my future an overhead light had been switched on and immediately, as soon as the room was illuminated, turned off again, dropping the room back into pitch darkness, and though I would remember what I had seen, the way one remembers a week-old dream, I would not glimpse it again until after it was long past and gone.
“I’m a bit early, I know,” Woodrow said, still smiling. “My apologies, dear Hannah. But I wanted to show you a little of our fair city before darkness descends.”
I fell into his arms, weeping freshly, out of control, ashamed of myself and feeling foolish, a silly, weak-kneed American girl falling into the arms of a big, strong African man. But I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t tell him what it was that had made me weep and practically ask him to hold me. I didn’t know if it was the sight of the mutilated, imprisoned chimpanzees that had made me weep or this awful, roach-ridden, rat-infested place. Or the fear of Africa, of being so alone this far from anything or anyone familiar to me. Zack, who had made Africa seem almost friendly and as already known to me as it was to him, was no longer there. I’d come so far away that everyone I had ever known was gone from my life now. Then I thought that perhaps it was the shock and relief from having suddenly found myself no longer living underground. Yes, that’s why I’m weeping, I decided. Replacing my false identity and the fears and comforts that accompanied it with my ill-fitting old identity and its fears and comforts had to be a sharp blow to the psyche. It had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that I was reacting to it only now.
Or was it the quickly fading vision of my future?
Or all of these at once?
Woodrow eased me from the building to the yard outside, where it felt comparatively cool. For the first time since entering the building I inhaled deeply. Woodrow drew the heavy door shut behind us, clicked the lock onto the hasp, and walked me slowly towards the waiting car, all the while murmuring into my ear that I was surely exhausted, that I needn’t worry about the chimps. He had roused their attendant, Haddad, from a nap, and the man was on his way over now to feed and water the poor beasts. And a nice air-conditioned ride about the city would revive me, and then, over a leisurely dinner on the terrace of the Mamba Point Hotel overlooking the sea, we would get to know one another better and more personally.
“Hannah, I want you to know that I have decided to take an interest in your situation,” he said. “Does that please you?”
I didn’t answer him. But the truth is it did please me. It pleased me immensely.
FOR THE FIRST few months of our courtship, as in the old days with Zack, I felt that one of us, Woodrow or I, was wearing a mask. But I had no way of knowing which. With Zack, it had been as if both of us peered through eyeholes, so no problem: Zack and I were each two people, and knew it.
Maybe it was this courting business. Over the years I had been involved with many men — not many, actually, even though it’s the sixties and early seventies we’re talking about here, and my twenties. Numerous, let’s say. And I had believed at least twice that I was in love, once for as long as six months, both times wrongly and inconsequentially. They were crushes, infatuations, fixations, maybe, and there’s no point in my going into detail here. The truth is, I had never really been in love. And, perhaps more important, I had never been courted before. This was new and strange and exciting, and although the process confused me, I plunged ahead anyhow.
I wondered if this was how it had been for my mother and father. “When your father and I were courting…” my mother’s illustrations from her youth frequently began, but when it came to matters of the hearts and minds and men and women and the language used to portray them, I was a pure product of my generation and thus hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about.
Two or three times I’d stopped my mother’s story and asked directly, “What do you mean, ‘courting’?”
“You know, dear, when Daddy and I were first together. When he was in med school and I was still at Smith…”
“What do you mean, ‘together’?”
“Well, dating, I guess. And all that. Getting to know one another. The way one does,” she said, her voice rising. “Before one marries, I mean.” Her eyes darted nervously away from my gaze, as if I’d accused her of having done something disgraceful. “Why are you asking this, Hannah? I was only telling a little story.”
Why, indeed? I knew what my mother meant. I knew my mommy’s language, her silences and euphemisms, her code words and coy abbreviations, knew them better than I knew the language of my friends. My mother was right to feel defensive and angry. I was attacking her. But for what? For her timidity concerning the subject of sex, I suppose. For her placid reliance on words like courting and dating, as if they meant the same to every woman of every age and thus could be used politely under any and all circumstances to conceal as much as they revealed.
I wanted to say, Do you mean when you and Daddy were first fucking, Mother? Is that what you’re remembering at the start of your twenty-times-told tale of the day that he took you to meet his parents for the first time? And while you all sat in the parlor — it was a parlor, not a living room, right? — waiting for the maid to call you to lunch, the three of them, Daddy and Grandfather and Grandmother Musgrave, silently read, Grandmother from her Bible, Grandfather from the Wall Street Journal, and Daddy from a medical textbook; and you, Mother, sat alone on the wide, hard sofa with your legs crossed primly at the ankles and stared at your lap, silenced by the silence of the others, as if the three of them were not reading but were lost in private prayer.
Courting. And now here I was myself dealing with a man in the same way, meeting him for lunch and dinner three and four times a week, talking on the telephone almost daily, giving and receiving little gifts, meeting his friends, and soon, soon, he promised, his family, but plenty of time yet for that. I was dealing with Woodrow Sundiata in a way that I knew could only be called courting.
And we weren’t fucking. We were barely kissing. We held hands when walking along the moonlit beach, but rarely in public, and were held in each other’s arms when dancing at the Mamba Point Hotel or at the several government and Masonic balls that Woodrow invited me to. Mostly, though, we talked, talked to one another, talked in the way that is specific to courtship, speaking at first, as all lovers do, through a mask to a mask — long hours of talk that over time, weeks, months, slowly, atom by atom, transformed the mask of the other into an actual face and made one’s own mask as invisible to the wearer as to the viewer. It was how one lost track of the masks and how one came to know oneself anew. I thought: So this is what it’s like, being in love! I get it. You become a new person! A person unknown.