Love,
Hannah
My father did not write back. Nor did my mother.
YOU THINK IT’S never going to end. First the fucking. Then the pregnancy. The delivery. The infancy. And then it actually ends.
It’s not that any one of them goes on forever — some, like the fucking and the actual birthing part, last only minutes or hours. But all of them, while they last, seem without beginning or end, and whatever stage of the two-year-long process you’re enduring, from fucking to the end of infancy, it seems to be all there is. And I went through it twice, overlapping — first with Dillon; then, just as I finished nursing him, with the twins, Paul and William.
First you think, This is what my life is now. This is who I am. My life is this endless grinding and thumping, being ground and thumped. Then you think, no, my life now will be spent floundering clumsily inside and around the thick waters of my own strangely misshapen body. No, it’s shitting red-hot coals to give birth. Turning myself into an inverted volcano. Then you think, no, I’m the leaking person who gives her sore breasts over to another creature’s sucking mouth, and when the baby is filled, cleans up its vomit, piss, and shit.
Over and over, the same cycle, month after month. This is what my life is now, you think. This is who I am. And everyone, especially if she’s a woman, assures you that you will love all the stages of this life, that each stage will make you feel for the first time increasingly like a fully realized woman, an expanded and deepened version of your old self.
THIS IS THE END of my history, I thought. My life has become a series of endless moments. There’s no more story to it. I got pregnant right away, probably the first time Woodrow and I fucked. Sorry about the language, but I can’t call it “made love.” I don’t think Woodrow and I ever actually made love, although, Lord knows, we fucked constantly, at least in the early years we did. At his urging always, never mine. From the very beginning, Woodrow’s way of making love to me, and consequently my way of making love to him, was chilled, methodical, obligatory, and, even when slow and drawn out, brutal. It was the same for years as it was on our “honeymoon” at the posh beach house south, along the coast, loaned to Woodrow by Liberia’s friendly World Bank representative.
That first night, still half-drunk from the reception champagne — ten iced cases of Dom Perignon delivered to the reception by the president himself — and exhausted and confused by the crowd of people I barely knew, and weirdly, unexpectedly desolated by loneliness, I went straight to the bedroom that looked out on the moonlit beach and crashing surf beyond, doused the lights, undressed, and literally tossed myself onto the enormous, king-size bed and stared up at the slow-moving, overhead fan, and said to myself, Thank God that’s over!
And then thought, But, Lord, Lord, what have I done?
I could hear Woodrow where I had just left him, prowling proudly through the house, patting the leather-upholstered furniture imported from Miami and checking out the brand-new, stainless-steel kitchen appliances from Sweden, opening liquor cabinets and linen closets with undisguised glee and rising dreams of gluttony. He was delirious with happiness. And because I knew the reason he was happy, I hated him. And because I was the reason, the agent for his happiness, I hated myself, too. He had a Christian wife at last, and better yet, a white Christian wife, and better still, a white Christian American wife!
His marriage ceremony, to be sure, had been a little unusual — his bride had invited to the wedding no family members or friends of her own to raise toasts and share in the hosting or to present her, and had offered him no dowry, not even a single cow or a meager plot of arable land; she had brought him and his family nothing. I had arrived like a captured bride, booty. Nonetheless, an ordained Christian minister had presided over the nuptials, and at the reception in the grand ballroom of the Mesurado Point Hotel, where the air conditioning and sound system broke down fifteen minutes into the party, Woodrow Sundiata had been visibly honored by all the elite members of government in attendance and by the chief representatives of business, foreign and domestic. Woodrow’s people had come in from Fuama village, nearly thirty of them in elaborately feathered and wooden tribal costumes, carried to Monrovia in the back of a flatbed truck, and had danced, drummed, and sung for him and his bride and their guests all the hot afternoon long, and his father and mother had declared publically (although they’d had to do it in their native language rather than in English, and no one seemed to hear them) their pleasure and pride in this marriage, or so I was told by Woodrow, and there had been many florid toasts and speeches from members of the government. Not from the president himself, of course, but several of the more lugubrious ministers spoke. And despite my shortcomings, because of what I was rather than who I was, there was now a certain glamor to Woodrow and an almost enviable modernity. Suddenly Woodrow Sundiata possessed visible evidence that he was a city man, a worthy member of the Liberian elite, clearly a man fit for the president’s inner circle. If he had married a Liberian woman instead, even a descendant of the old African-American ruling class, he would have remained the same little, slightly boring, American-educated bureaucrat, the clever, but not too clever, missionary-boy from the bush. (By now I saw how he looked to others and was beginning to look to me, as well.) With me as his wife, however, Woodrow was exotic, a little sexy, and possibly dangerous, as if his newly consecrated American connection gave him access to power and information that were unavailable to other Liberians, even among the elite. Women flirted with Woodrow now, showed him their bare brown shoulders, large bosoms and butts, their big, bright teeth. Men sidled up to him and spoke confidentially to him of deals and possibilities and newly conceived alliances, then reported back to their brethren: Hey, my brother, you see? Even the Belgian representative of the World Bank has given the man the use of his private, very lovely, very expensive beach house for a honeymoon cottage. He’s now a man to keep track of. Woodrow Sundiata sleeps on fine Belgian cotton sheets tonight. The sub-minister sleeps with a white American woman tonight and every night. And she will connect him to the big American and European world out there beyond Liberia where, mysteriously, people get quickly rich and end up with power over other people’s lives and livelihoods. Woodrow Sundiata, my brothers, has become a man to deal with.
He strolled into the darkened bedroom, where I lay splayed on the bed in my underwear, lost in morbid thoughts of having somehow lost my history, of being trapped inside an endless moment. I couldn’t explain it to myself. I wondered if, when my politics disappeared, my only hope for an autobiographical narrative had disappeared, too. It had happened piecemeal, in small erasures, going back to New Bedford and barely noticed at the time, and now I seemed to be living outside of time, without cause or consequence.