My grandparents turned their hard gazes on my mother, and both of them nearly smiled, as if suppressing frowns. My grandmother said to my mother, “Well, then, welcome to the family, Iris.”
“Yes,” my grandfather said. “Welcome.”
And my mother said, “Thank you. Thank you both.”
She herself had no family to which she could welcome them and thus, struggling to find something appropriate to say, could only say thank you, over and over, and in time came to believe that her gratitude was genuine.
Except for an aunt in Windsor, Ontario, my mother was alone in the world. Her parents had been killed in the crash of a small private plane piloted by her father, my other grandfather. He had been a speculator in Canadian farmland, very successful. He and his wife were returning to Windsor from a combined western holiday and the auction of a cattle ranch in Alberta, when, somewhere over Lake Superior, with my grandfather at the controls, the plane entered a suddenly rising zone of thunderstorms and didn’t come out the other side. Their bodies were never recovered, and my mother’s aunt, her sole surviving relative, delayed telling my mother for nearly a month, waiting for the girl to finish her exams at Smith. It was my mother’s freshman year, the first time the girl had been away from home, so no need to make things worse than they were, losing both parents like that, by obliging her to postpone or cancel her end-of-semester exams. There was no funeral to come home to, anyhow, and my mother’s aunt, who had been managing her now-deceased brother’s office for years, while he flew about the continent buying and selling tracts of land, could easily take care of any legal and financial matters that came up. She had power of attorney, and the girl was a minor.
My mother seemed to have spent her entire life in a state of low-grade mourning, which was why she never wanted more than one child. She still loved her own prematurely lost childhood too much, or so I believed then, to give it up and try becoming an adult.
With my father, it was different. But only in degree, not kind. In fear of his parents’ disapproval of any family structure unlike theirs — a mother, a father, and a single, obedient, overachieving child — he had cut his life to fit their template. He became a pediatrician, eventually, and through his child-rearing books, a world-famous pediatrician, not out of a love of children, but as a secret rebuttal to his parents’ unwillingness to love their single, obedient, overachieving child. And because all the world’s children were his, none was. Except me, of course. I was his child. But much of the time when growing up, I felt less his child than his test case, the proof in his pudding, exhibit A-to-Z put forward to an adoring public as evidence of the wisdom and practicality of Dr. Musgrave’s theories on progressive and humane child-raising in America at mid — twentieth century.
But all that was before 1968, before the Chicago Democratic Convention and 1969 and the Days of Rage and my arrest, indictment, and flight, and before the years in the Weather Underground, the bombings, the robberies, the terrorist campaign against the war, against colonialism and U.S. imperialism — all that was before Africa.
WOODROW WASN’T EXACTLY sure, but he thought that altogether he had forty-two brothers and sisters. Maybe more.
My mouth dropped. Woodrow smiled. An old joke. But that was counting all his father’s children by his four wives, he said, still smiling. From his father’s first wife, he farther explained, there were only five children, of which he, Woodrow, was the youngest, which is why he had been allowed to attend missionary school and from there enroll in a preparatory school here in town, in Monrovia, and then, on a church-sponsored scholarship, travel to the United States, where he had studied business at Gordon College, a Baptist school in Beverly, Massachusetts, only a few miles from Emerson, the town where I had grown up. Woodrow’s older brother, Jonathan, and his three sisters had stayed in the village, because of their responsibilities to the family. Woodrow had met his responsibilities to the family by finding jobs for about twenty of his half-siblings and cousins so far, in the government of President William Tolbert and in the True Whig party, of which he was a national officer, as were all cabinet ministers and sub-ministers. He was able to do this, he said proudly, because his mother and grandmother were Americos, descended directly from the African-American founders of the Republic of Liberia, and not full-blooded Kpelle like his father and grandfather, who were headmen descended from headmen.
Woodrow’s family pride was much greater than mine. It colored his every reference to them, and I envied him that pride. I admired it. I wanted it for myself. “Woodrow,” I said, as he reached across me to open the car door, “would you like to stay with me tonight?”
I had startled him. He blinked, frozen in mid-reach. I’d startled myself as well. Where had that come from? I hadn’t once, all evening long, thought of sleeping with him. I’d enjoyed attracting him and was aware that the attention I’d received from the big men at the head table had aroused Woodrow, but making love with him? Now? It had not crossed my mind. This was not usually the case — for no other reason than because he was an African, I actually thought Woodrow sexually unusual, let’s say, and wondered almost constantly what he would be like in bed. Tender or rough? Gentle and generous, or harshly demanding? Knowledgeable of a woman’s body or, like almost every man I had slept with so far, woefully ignorant of it?
He was a small man, small hands and feet, small ears. I liked small men.
“Well, yes, of course,” he said. “Of course. Yes, I would like to stay with you tonight. But, no. No.” Then, regaining his balance, “It’s not the right time, Hannah darling. Not yet. I don’t mean to seem a prude, you understand. Or to suggest that you’re not desirable to me. Quite the opposite. No, it’s just—”
“I am really embarrassed,” I said, interrupting. “I guess … well, I thought that was what was on your mind.”
He laughed, affecting the big African man’s deep, dark laugh. “Always! Always! But first things first. As you Americans say. Hannah, I want you to meet my people. Then … then we will be free to follow our desires.” He chuckled the Englishman’s chuckle.
“Is that customary?” I asked him. “Do you usually have your family meet a woman before you sleep with her? Am I being too frank, Woodrow?”
“No, not at all, not at all. Not too frank at all. It’s only the American way of speaking, isn’t it? I like the American way of speaking, even in a woman. But in answer to your question, you are the first woman I have invited to meet my people. Remember, I’m inviting you to meet them, not inviting them to meet you. I’m my own man, Hannah, not theirs. This meeting is for you. For you and for me. Not them.”
He pressed the door handle, and Satterthwaite opened it wide for me to exit. Woodrow kissed my hand, as had become his custom by then, and smiled sweetly, and I stepped from the car. “When you have met my people, then we can sit down and decide what we will do next. Together. Goodnight, Hannah,” he said.
“Goodnight,” I said. “I’m sorry, Woodrow, if I misunderstood.” I felt almost bawdy, what my mother used to call “cheap.” I turned away before he could respond, and made for my cabin. The car pulled out onto the road. Halfway across the compound I stopped and watched its taillights fade and disappear and then stood for a long, lingering moment in thick darkness, letting a flurry of images of slow, comforting sex with Woodrow and marriage to him and bearing his children and settling into a permanent life in Africa flutter randomly down, obliterating neat, orderly thoughts of tomorrow and the next day and the next, the mundane details of my daily routine. I was bored by the thoughts of tomorrow and my ongoing days, one by one by one — but, oh, the images of a permanent life in Africa, though they frightened me, they were exciting and made my skin prickle. They signified a future! I hadn’t had a vision of an actual, believable future in a long time, not for years.