And you can be sure that I’d questioned the racial aspect of my love for Woodrow. I had dealt with that in the Movement long ago, after I’d gone through a rather lengthy period, eighteen months or so, of wanting to sleep only with black men. And did, with way too many of them, until finally, one night in Cleveland after a long, grueling, self-critical session with my Weather cohort, I saw myself as a racist commodifier of sex, acting out the age-old exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer. At least that’s what I confessed to. It wasn’t long afterwards that I began my first love affair with a woman, a white social worker named June.
But all that had faded, blown away like wisps of clouds after a storm. Now I can’t even remember June’s last name. Irish, I recall that much. June was Irish and had gone to Antioch. Of the too many black men I slept with, with the exception of the two or three I’d worked with in the Movement, I remember not even their first names. Calvin? Daryl? Walker? Why even call up the names of those poor men? It was long ago. And wrong.
So what was it about Woodrow Sundiata that brought me to believe that I had fallen in love with him and that made me, after a few short months, decide to marry him? My initial attraction had been mostly sexual, and within weeks, once I got used to his rigid, nearly expressionless face and constricted manners, had weakened somewhat. I no longer saw him as an African samurai. What, exactly, then, did I see in him, other than a benefactor and protector? If it wasn’t the color of his skin, perhaps it was the fact that he was African. That he was pointedly not American. In those years, I was bone weary of my war against everything American. The war against American racism, the war against the Vietnam War, the war against the System — all of it. It felt like I’d been at war my entire life, even as a child and adolescent waging the war against my parents. I hadn’t realized it until after I’d left Ghana and Zack, my last links to the Movement, but by the time I arrived in Monrovia, I was in a sense shell shocked.
Here in Liberia with Woodrow, it was peacetime for Hannah, almost as if all those old wars had been won, instead of lost or merely abandoned. Never in my life had I felt as free of anger as I felt then. That old, constant, edgy watchfulness, an irritated grasping after righteousness that I could never really trust anyhow — I felt none of it there. This was Africa, and the people who surrounded me and the man who was courting me were Africans. American racism, the Vietnam War, even the Cold War and the System that fed off it, and my parents — they mean nothing to the Africans, I thought then. And, presumably, could mean nothing to me, too.
Later, of course, I would think differently, but for the time being, floating between two identities, the one called Dawn Carrington, and the other Hannah Musgrave, I was at peace. A woman with two names I was nameless, with so many pasts I had no past. Leaving Ghana and Zack behind, I’d come to Liberia and had stumbled into bliss. It was in a state of surprised blissfulness, then, that I had met Woodrow Sundiata, and now I was about to meet his people and, if they approved, to marry him. Which, I knew, would take me even farther away from my wars, my parents, my pasts, than I had managed so far.
“When shall I meet them?”
“Saturday. I’ve sent word ahead, so they can prepare for your visit. This will be a significant day for them. In my family I am the only one who has not yet married. You’ve not yet been to the back country, have you?”
“No, I guess not. How … what shall I wear?” I felt foolish asking, but I knew that in an important sense this was a ceremonial occasion. I kept thinking of my mother’s first meeting with her future in-laws, the anxious silence in the parlor as the people who would become my father and grandparents read their respective Bibles, and the girl from Smith College sat alone on the sofa and looked from one Musgrave to the other, wondering who these people were, that such weird behavior could seem natural. And when they had finally been called to the dining room by the maid in her starched black uniform with the white collar and everyone was seated, Mother Musgrave said to her son, “Bernard, will you say grace?”
The college girl watched the others, and when they lowered their heads and closed their eyes, she did the same and for the first time heard her fiancé pray aloud to God and His resurrected Son. When he had finished, In Jesus’ name, amen, she opened her eyes and saw the cold, clotted vichyssoise suppurating in the dish before her. Oh, dear, she must have thought. What have I gotten myself into?
No one spoke. Silver clanked. The father slurped. The maid arrived with bread and soundlessly paddled back across the thick carpet to the kitchen. Finally, the son, the Yale medical student, cleared his throat, placed his soup spoon carefully down, and said, “Mother? Father? I have an announcement to make.”
The others looked up and placed their soup spoons as carefully down as he. The college girl did as they and put her hands in her lap. The mother dabbed at the corners of her thin, lipless mouth with her napkin. The girl did the same. The father turned in his chair to face his son, as if interviewing him for a position at the bank.
“Announce away!” Father Musgrave ordered.
The son, a tall, too-thin boy of twenty-four with permanently tousled brown hair and a large Adam’s apple, cleared his throat again and said, “Well, I’ve asked a girl to become my wife.” He looked across the table at the girl who would become my mother and smiled nervously, and the girl smiled back in a way that she hoped was reassuring and proud. “And I’m happy to say that she’s accepted!” he declared and laughed awkwardly. “How about that?”
There was a brief silence. His father turned back to his soup, as if deciding not to hire the boy after all.
His mother said, “That’s nice, dear,” followed by a long pause. “Who’s the girl?”
The story always ends there, its point, as far as my mother was concerned, made. She was the only one who told it, and she never told it with my father present and of course never in front of my grandparents. She believed that it was about her, after all, not them. But I had always wondered, what happened then? Did the girl get up from the table and run out? Did the boy try to smooth over the sudden rumples in the occasion by quickly excusing himself from the table and following his fiancée to the foyer? She already had her coat on and buttoned, tears of shame and humiliation in her eyes, and he held her by the shoulders and explained that she mustn’t take it personally, his parents were cold only because they were frightened.
“That’s what powerful people do when they’re frightened, darling, they go cold on you.” I can hear him now, his voice seductively calm, so reasonable sounding — a kindly, wise man, even back then, when he was little more than a college boy. “They have only me, you know. And they’re afraid of losing me to you.”
They touched hands lightly, and the girl took off her coat, wiped her tears away, and the two returned to the table as if nothing untoward had happened.
But I know it didn’t go like that.
The girl who would become my mother didn’t leave the table. She wouldn’t dare. She sat there instead with a sickly smile pasted onto her face and wondered, as she would for the rest of her years, if she had been insulted, which was why she told the story repeatedly. And the boy who became my father, his voice raised a register, as if driven by excitement rather than fear, said, “The girl I’ve chosen to marry is right here with us today! It’s Iris!”