A wedge of shadow darted past my ear. A bat. In the distance a dog barked once and went silent, as if kicked. There was a rustling noise coming from the Quonset hut at the rear of the compound, and I started quickly for my cabin. Before I reached the porch steps, a single chimp had begun to pant and hoot, and in seconds another had joined in, then more, and by the time I opened the door of the cabin, the chimps, all of them, were howling and banging against the bars of their cages.
WOODROW ARRIVED AT the compound early the following Saturday, chauffeured in the ministry car by the faithful and ever watchful Satterthwaite. He hadn’t answered my question the night before about what to wear, and I was shy about asking him again, but figured I’d better dress like a proper white lady — a pale yellow cotton sundress, a floppy, broad-brimmed hat, and sensible, low-heeled shoes, purchased in town the day before. Which turned out to be correct. My usual daytime uniform of jeans, tee shirt, and sneakers would not have cut it. It troubled me slightly that, bit by bit, week by week, my African wardrobe was coming to resemble my mother’s collection of resort wear.
Woodrow’s outfit that day resembled nothing from my father’s closet, however. He wore a starched, white guayabera shirt, pale blue Bermuda shorts, brown British shoes and knee socks, and a new pair of round tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Beside him on the seat an old-fashioned pith helmet lay at the ready. Evidently, when a government sub-minister goes to his village, he does not want to be mistaken for a villager.
I got in back and kissed him on the cheek. “You look like a missionary, Woodrow,” I said and smiled: Just teasing, honey. He frowned. I kissed him again.
“You don’t approve?” he said. His frown became a scowl.
“No, I like the look. Especially the eyeglasses. I mean, you seem very… official. For a family visit, that is.”
“Yes, well, in a sense I suppose this visit is somewhat official.”
The car sped along the road, splashing through steaming puddles of water. It had rained earlier, and sunlight flashed like strobes off the overhanging, bright green foliage and fronds. We were headed north from the compound, which was located east of the harbor on the inland edge of Monrovia. I hadn’t been out this way before. My travels in Liberia so far had been strictly limited to the immediate neighborhood of the plasma lab and to the commercial area downtown and west of the city out to the beaches and hotels beyond, where I’d gone solely in Woodrow’s company. Due to the attention I attracted, especially from other white people, and my residual underground paranoia — which I clung to in spite of Woodrow’s assurance that there was no possibility of my being arrested by the Americans or anyone else — I was still wary of traveling about the country on my own.
Pavement turned to gravel, and the brightly painted, air-conditioned homes of the affluent Monrovians, with their close-cropped lawns and iron-spike fences and the occasional security guard on patrol, gave way to one-room roadside shops and small, rectangular, daub-and-wattle cabins, many with zinc or thatched roofs. Manicured lawns and flower gardens were replaced by vegetable patches and burned-over fields ready for planting and long stretches of dense brush, then solid, continuous jungle. Soon the road was red dirt, and there were fewer and fewer vehicles: Chinese bicycles wobbling under two and three riders, handcarts pushed by shirtless boys, and now and then a crowded rattle-trap of a van or mud-spattered pickup headed for the city.
A crippled yellow dog — Satterthwaite refused to slow for it or adjust speed or direction an iota — heroically dragged its hindquarters across the road just in time to avoid being hit. People walked alongside the road, mostly women and girls with babies strapped on their backs and heavy loads of garden crops balanced on their heads. They watched us blow past and, expressionless, as if the Mercedes were weather, turned away from the wake of dusty wind that followed and resumed trudging towards Monrovia and the weekend market there.
“My father’s name is Duma,” Woodrow said. “Duma Sundiata. He’s the headman of his quarter in the village. Not head of the village its ownself, which has a chief, a paramount chief, above the headmen. So some people like to say my father Duma a small-small man.” His voice had dropped a register, and he had slipped into rapid-fire Liberian English, usually with me a sign of easy intimacy. But today he sounded anxious. “But he’s abi-namu,” he said. “That means he’s a direct descendant of the Kpelle ancestors, and he has many farms and many children, so even the paramount chief of the village thinks very well of him and invites him to the most important palavers.”
“Palavers?”
“For settling disputes and such amongst the peoples. The village name is Fuama. Fuama is very small, very isolated. Small-small. Only a village. Fuama is about fifty miles from here, three and a half, maybe four hours.”
I couldn’t tell if he was worried more about the impression I would make on his people or the impression his people would make on me, so I said nothing. Reassuring Woodrow was not my strong suit then. He was still too much a mystery to me.
“My father, Duma, he comin’ to receive us,” he continued. “But him want to present us to the chief and to the other headmen, prob’ly. Same for my mother, Adina, and the other headmen wives. Alla them know why we comin’ out,” he added.
“Oh. They do? Why exactly are we coming, Woodrow?”
He turned to me, eyebrows raised above his glasses, surprised by my question. “Well, it’s to tell them of our plans, Hannah darling,” he said, his low-voiced Liberian-English turning subtly British again, almost a patrician drawl.
“Plans?”
“Our plans to marry. So they won’t be surprised and have hurt feelings when they find out about it later. Since we won’t be able to do it in Fuama, and certainly not in the traditional way,” he said.
“I don’t know why not. I can handle that. I might even prefer a traditional wedding,” I said. “But, look, Woodrow, you haven’t actually proposed marriage to me. Not formally, I mean.” I tacked on a small laugh. Keep it light.
“Ah!” he said, as if suddenly remembering. He smiled gently, but his nose and forehead and upper lip were shiny with sweat, as if the conversation were becoming a wee bit uncomfortable. “Yes, well. Yes, I assumed, after our talk the other night—”
“No, no, that’s okay, I assumed it, too,” I said, interrupting. “I didn’t expect you to get down on one knee and ask for my hand, and you can’t very well go to my father and ask his permission. No, it’s okay. I knew what you were saying. And I agree. I mean, I accept your proposal. Consider it accepted.” I didn’t want to make him say what he seemed reluctant or maybe unable to say, but at the same time I wondered what else had I missed all these weeks we’d been together? What other exchanges had I agreed to, other offers accepted?
“Tell me what you mean,” I said. “That we won’t be able to do it in Fuama in the traditional way.”
“Well, you … you’re a foreigner. And there are certain important conditions that a Kpelle girl, that any native girl, has to meet.”
“Conditions?”
“A certain type of education and experience. And it’s … it’s rather too late for you. It would be too late even if you weren’t a foreigner, because a woman learns it as a child, as a young girl. She learns it from her family and her people. She learns it from the older women, and in a special way that’s not known to men. We males, we learn other things.” He was silent for a moment, and his face was shut, as if he were trying to remember the words of an old song. “We … the people, they have societies for this,” he said with slight embarrassment. The societies for the girls and women were called Sande, he explained, and Poro for the men, secret, highly ritualistic associations, a bit like American college sororities and fraternities, I gathered, except that the Sande and the Poro were ancient and engaged the entire community in their rites and governance. They had strict rules and harsh punishments for violators of the rules; they had officers and emblems of office, secret signs and words, and elaborate regalia and ceremonies that the ancestors had established long before the Europeans arrived. Sande and Poro connected the living to the dead, the physical world to the spiritual world, girls to women and boys to men and men and women to each other, and through rite, secret knowledge, and shared belief they organized and facilitated a person’s transition from one state of being to another.