This inland territory, the bush, was ancient. Primeval. From before the Fall, it seemed. Here the needs of nature and humanity were collaborative and far more peacefully meshed than back along the coastal region, where Monrovia, the capital, and the other, smaller cities of Liberia — with their modern industrial spoilage and smoke-spewing cars and diesel trucks and buses — waged warfare against the jungle that surrounded them. Down there, from the border with Côte d’Ivoire in the east to the border with Sierra Leone in the west, human beings and their machines were chewing their way inland, greedily devouring the land and everything on it.
It was like that all over equatorial Africa then, especially on the coast, and is even worse now; but in the mid-1970s, when this journey took place, the upland region of Liberia still remained essentially untouched by industry and technology, by modernity; and as we moved farther and farther away from the coast and the plantations on the lower plateau, I felt myself steadily slipping backwards in time. The twentieth century disappeared behind us, then the nineteenth was gone, the eighteenth, and the seventeenth. Lost to my mind were the crowded, rapidly swelling coastal cities, the rubber plantations, the railroad lines, even the roads that had spread inland from the seaside trading stations built first by Europeans and then Americans. The iron mines hadn’t yet been established, the gigantic mahogany and cotton trees still loomed overhead, blocking out the sun, and diamonds hadn’t been uncovered and sold for guns. Chimpanzees hadn’t been captured, caged, and bred for the development of multibillion-dollar drugs. They and all the other now-decimated species were still out there in the jungle, abundant, invisible, silent, watching us pass. This, I thought, is as close as I will ever get to West Africa as it was when the first Europeans arrived.
THE ROAD, barely a grassy trail now and no wider than the car, led to the edge of a slow-moving, brown river. A large raft made of cut poles lashed together with vines was waiting at the bank and the half-dozen men beside it, barefoot and wearing loose shorts, watched us approach as if expecting our arrival. The river was not wide — a boy could toss a ball to a boy on the other side — and a thick vine tied to a tree on both banks crossed the river just above the sluggish surface of the water.
“Beyond this river is my village,” Woodrow said. “Fuama.”
These were the first words he had spoken to me since I’d stepped from the car nearly two hours earlier and had been overcome by … what? A vision? A seizure. If I don’t know what to call it now, I certainly didn’t at the time. It had been a sudden, thoroughgoing confusion of needs and desires, I knew that much, even when it was happening, and little else. But looking back these many years later, I see it more clearly now, and if it was a vision, then it must have been the felt aftereffect of a collision between two conflicted desires that had been germinating in my subconscious for months. One desire had been generated by the woman named Hannah Musgrave, who wanted to become wholly herself again, free to go back to her parents and homeland; the other by the woman named Dawn Carrington, who also wanted to become wholly herself, but hoped in the process to disappear from her pursuers safely into Africa. My decision to marry Woodrow was turning both women — the lost but still loving daughter and the fugitive revolutionary — into a bourgeois African man’s loving American wife. It had set Hannah’s and Dawn’s opposing desires on a collision course. If I married Woodrow, Hannah would never go home again, and Dawn would not disappear into Africa. It would be as if neither woman had ever existed, as if both had been from the beginning nothing more than fictions. In deciding to marry Woodrow, I was deciding to abandon my dream of assuming the identity I had been given in childhood and youth, as well as the identity I had replaced it with.
I glimpsed that fact that day, and it terrified me, and when I fled from the safety and comfort of the ministry car and embraced that poor, pathetic, female goat, it was not to comfort her, but somehow to induce her to comfort me. To help me believe that what I saw coming towards me would not arrive.
THE CAR COASTED from the road onto the raft and stopped. To the man in charge Satterthwaite spoke a few words in the man’s language and dropped a coin into his hand. Satterthwaite closed the window and let the motor and air-conditioner continue to purr, as the crew of muscular men, like a team in a tug-of-war, somberly, rhythmically pulled on the thick vine and drew us slowly across the river, where I saw gathered on the farther bank a large, rapidly growing crowd of naked and near-naked men, women, and children. They were a somber group, like a photo from an old National Geographic, the women with large, pendulous breasts, the men with tightly muscled arms and chests, the children with round bellies and protruding navels — a passive, yet withheld and slightly suspicious-looking crowd, as if waiting for us to make our intentions clear, not exactly welcoming, and not in the slightest ceremonial. I suppose I expected feathers and masks and drums, elaborate headdresses, leopard-skin capes, and woven breastplates, not, as they seemed, a loose collection of poverty-stricken hunters-gatherers. Woodrow’s people. His family. Soon to be mine.
Satterthwaite drove the Mercedes slowly from the raft and onto the mudded clearing, parting the crowd, and shut off the motor.
“End of the road,” Woodrow said and chuckled. He put his pith helmet on and, checking himself in the rear-view mirror, squared it.
“End of the road,” Satterthwaite repeated, and he, too, chuckled. He stepped from the car and opened my door for me to exit, then jumped to Woodrow’s door.
Immediately, as soon as we were out of the car, the people surrounded us, all of them talking at once in loud voices pitched at the same high, flattened tone, their rapid-fire cries, calls, and speeches directed entirely at Woodrow, who shook hands with the men like a visiting plenipotentiary, smiled and nodded politely to the women and children, but said nothing in response to anyone and did nothing to present or even to acknowledge me. Satterthwaite, leaning against the hood, arms folded across his chest, waited by the car and with a sly smile on his face watched Woodrow and me in our city shoes and clothes make our awkward way up the slippery embankment.
Woodrow reached the top of the bank before the rest of us and without a pause plunged into the forest there. The crowd, focused entirely on Woodrow — their village champion returned from a far country in triumph — followed him, and I followed them, more or less ignored, except for the smallest children, the babies, who stared at me with wonderment and a shadow of worry on their brown faces, until their mothers caught them looking and turned them around, shifting them to where they couldn’t see me anymore or else covered their faces with a flattened hand or a large leaf torn from a nearby tree.
It was very hot, and the ground was wet and muddy, and the path was narrow and half-covered with wet, overhanging ferns and bushes. I had difficulty keeping pace with the others and at one point, hurrying to catch up, slipped and fell, smearing my dress, hands, and lower legs with red mud. I blurted, “Shit!” but no one looked back. No one paid me the slightest attention. To everyone, it seemed, except for the babies, who’d been all but blindfolded by their mothers, I was practically invisible. Which, before I arrived there, may well have been what I wanted. I wanted to see them but didn’t want them to see me. It was not, however, what I’d expected. And now that it was happening, it made no sense to me. Some welcoming party, I thought.