IN AFRICA, especially early on, when the boys were babies and for many years afterwards, I had no such ruse to protect me. Especially around home, where my natural abilities were inappropriate or at best useless — except, perhaps, to the chimps, although even there Woodrow wanted me to delegate the physical work, give it to the native men and women who worked at the lab. My proper job, other than to function as Woodrow’s consort, was to supervise the household staff and to mother and raise his sons as little Americo-Liberian gentlemen. Consort and chief of staff were mindless tasks that I could handle in my sleep, practically. Turning myself into mommy was something else, however.
It was, as I said, Jeannine who taught me what I needed to know to get by. She showed me how to fake it as a mother, and when I couldn’t fake it, substituted for me altogether. She was little more than a child herself, barely eighteen years old and freshly arrived from the village of Fuama, not quite literate and, under her uncle the deputy minister’s tutelage and protection, eager to become a Christian. She had been part of the family dance troupe that performed at our wedding, and afterwards, at Woodrow’s request, although he didn’t tell me at the time, had remained in town and moved into his house, now my house, to cook and clean for us.
The house itself, up to now strictly a bachelor’s quarters, was owned by the government, one of a dozen or so that had originally been private residences built or bought by foreigners who’d afterwards moved up the housing scale or gotten themselves assigned to some other African capital. The houses had been acquired over the years by the government to dispense as favors or small rewards to ministers and VIPs and came with a staff, a car, and a driver, all paid for out of the national treasury. The residence assigned to Woodrow was a sprawling, white, single-story structure with a wide front porch and floor-to-ceiling windows, high ceilings, and large airy rooms — an American-style residence probably built in the 1940s, the sort of house a small-town southern lawyer would have built for himself. Except, that is, for the eight-foot-high, cinder-block wall that surrounded it and the heavy iron gate and Woodrow’s pair of huge, black, drooling Rottweilers roaming the grounds.
There was a small patio at the side of the house, where we often ate dinner, and a master bedroom fit for a Jamaican plantation owner, with a four-poster bed and private bath and French doors that opened onto a flower garden and a second patio, where Woodrow and I sometimes took our breakfast. There was a small bedroom that would soon become the nursery, a bathroom, and two additional bedrooms, and behind the house a servants’ quarters and a laundry and utility room. There was even a gardener’s shack for Kuyo, the part-time yardman — another of Woodrow’s close relations come in from the country for the support and protection of his cousin, uncle, nephew, or half-brother — the deputy minister. I was discovering the age-old Liberian system of exchange between the powerful and the powerless, a form of indentured servitude that more closely resembled slavery than nepotism.
The house had been outfitted with modern plumbing back when the city water system still worked, but the municipal pumping station and delivery pipes and valves had long since fallen into disrepair. Consequently, faucets ran only in a trickle and for a few hours a day, while outside on the street water poured from broken mains day and night. We had electricity and all the usual appliances, a TV, too, but even in those days, when the country was still relatively stable, we rarely had power for longer than three or fours hours a day, usually in the mornings, and relied on kerosene lamps and candles at night, and more often than not we were obliged to cook with charcoal on a backyard tin stove.
To me, it was a luxurious setting, however, almost embarrassingly so, compared with how most Liberians lived. A comparison, incidentally, that I rarely had the opportunity to make — because of Woodrow’s insistence that I account for every minute of my day when he wasn’t in attendance and his use of Satterthwaite as a keeper and spy as much as a driver and bodyguard and his refusal to allow me to go anywhere in the city alone. “You must not forget who you are,” he insisted. “Please, Hannah darling. The wife of a high government official must not be confused with a Peace Corps volunteer.”
The truth is, I had forgotten who I was. That’s what marriage and motherhood had given me: the upshot of the fucking, the pregnancy, the birthing of my sons and their infancy was that I wasn’t more of a woman or less; I was a different woman. You probably think of me as strong and independent, and I believe that I am — now. I was strong and independent when I was young, too, back before I came to Africa. But in the years between? No. Emphatically no. I was different then.
My weakness and dependence on Woodrow and other men — and in time I’ll tell you about them, too — caused terrible pain and harm to many people. To my sons, especially. Who was that terrible woman, and how do I deal with her now? And the chimpanzees, my dreamers — I need to know who betrayed and abandoned them, too. Was it Hannah darling? Was it Dawn Carrington? Was it Scout? Whom must I hate? And what will be the sentence for her sins and crimes?
IT WAS JEANNINE who taught me how to buy groceries at the Saturday market at Congo Square, and how to cook Liberian style with palm oil, peanut, or groundnut oil, with coconut milk and plenty of hot peppers. There wasn’t much meat available that wasn’t tinned — plenty of fresh fish, however, and chicken, and occasionally pork and goat and stringy chunks of beef. I knew all too well, of course, the local habit of eating chimps and monkeys, bush meat — an atavistic throwback to cannibalism, as far as I was concerned. But it wasn’t merely the country people in the distant villages who relished it and offered it up as a special tribute to distinguished guests. The townspeople loved bush meat, too, and considered roasted ape a luxury item, a delicacy. By then Woodrow had come to accept my abhorrence of bush meat — crediting it to my affection for the chimps at the lab and later the sanctuary and perhaps a white American fastidiousness — and ate it himself only when he dined out without me. “It’s actually very sweet,” he said. “Cooked correctly, it’s better than any pork, and no kind of mutton compares. In fact, in Sierra Leone that’s what they call it, ‘spring mutton.’ ”
No, at home we ate jollof rice, rice fufu, coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls. With Jeannine at my elbow, I learned to cook them all. We ate plantains, breadfruit, yams, gari, or cassava mixed with fish or chicken, one-dish meals mostly. Desserts were fruit salads, banana fritters, tapioca pudding, and shredded coconut balls. The gorgeously colored vegetables and plump fruits were always fresh, firm, a pleasure to cut, chop, mix, fry, roast, steam, and chill.