This was a whole new enterprise for me, who’d never paid much attention to cooking or even to shopping for food. Food had always been fuel, already there on the table before me, or if not, then prepared as quickly and easily as possible, and eaten the same way. Nourishment, that’s all. Now, however, it had become an intricately linked sequence of deeply satisfying, sensual, spiritual, and social rituals. In the past, I’d never really cooked, not even when keeping house back in Cleveland, where the preparation and consumption of food and cleanup afterwards were rigorously communal, or in New Bedford with Carol and Bettina — Carol had done all the cooking, actually. I did the cleanup, like a good husband. In the months when I was living alone at the lab compound I’d depended on expensive, Western-style groceries and imported canned goods purchased at what passed for a supermarket, Dot-Dot’s, on Ashmun Street. But after Woodrow and I were married, the marketing became a Wednesday- and Saturday-morning ritual for me and Jeannine that continued for years, long after I was capable of handling it alone. It was one of the few occasions when Jeannine and I stood on more or less equal footing, when I was less than the mistress of the house and she more than my servant. For a long time I didn’t know how much more, and back then, especially when we shopped for food, I thought we were friends.
I remember walking with her to the square, enjoying the beauty of the crowd, the thronged streets, and then, looking for a particular herb or spice, taking side trips down the alleys and side streets to the shops of the poor. I remember putting my face and hands forward in gestures learned from watching Jeannine haggle and gossip with the shopkeepers in the market, who were all women, many of them from outlying villages, at first feeling foolish for it, awkward, inauthentic, somehow condescending, until it became natural and almost intimate.
But how I wished I were invisible. My white skin was a noise, loud and self-proclaiming. It declared my caste and status for all to hear. And I was both hated and envied for it. For a long while, whenever we went to market, hard looks and cold shoulders greeted me. Then, when it became known among the higglers and shopkeepers that I was Deputy Minister Sundiata’s wife, visibly pregnant by the minister, and was in Liberia to stay, coldness alternated with servile deference, as the shopkeepers bypassed the locals in line to serve me ahead of the others. One or the other, hatred or envy, rejection or servility, would have been endurable, on some occasions maybe even desirable, but coming together as they did, they were like a sty in the eye — a cause of pain, but one’s only means of seeing the world.
And it stayed painful, even after I had become a fixture in town, no longer exotic with my brown babies in tow or pushing a carriage. As soon as he could walk, Dillon went ahead hand in hand with Jeannine, while the twins, magical beings to Liberians, lay tucked into the carriage that I insisted on pushing, after the usual argument with Satterthwaite, who was still under strict orders to drive us in the car and wait while we did the shopping. I carried the money, and though Jeannine translated for me — for I understood almost no Liberian English then and even after years of hearing it daily got lost whenever native speakers wanted me lost — and did most of the actual bargaining, I did all the numbers, until Dillon decided he wanted to do the calculations himself. And I let him, a proud mamma, for it was his special gift. Early on, it had become obvious that Dillon was precocious with numbers. Good at math, as they say. Though not yet two and still clinging to Jeannine’s hip, he would call out numbers for no apparent reason, “Seventeen! Twelve! Twenty-nine!” And because neither Jeannine nor I could determine the source or meaning of his numbers, we assumed they were random bits, numbers overheard from Woodrow talking on the telephone to someone in the ministry, just meaningless sound scraps that he was repeating for the simple pleasure of it. Until one day I happened to notice that, just before calling out a new number, he would stare intently at the number plate of a nearby parked car, and it dawned on me that he was calling out the sum of the numbers on the plate. He shouted, “Seventeen!” and I looked where he had been looking and added the numbers, five plus seven plus two plus three—seventeen.
It was the first recognizable sign of his precocity, of his love of numbers and preternatural skill at using them, and it was how he quickly became his father’s favorite. “The boy is a genius at math,” Woodrow proudly declared to anyone who asked after his sons. “Like me.” The twins, however, Woodrow regarded with a strangely anxious wariness, as if the two boys knew things that mere mortals didn’t and perhaps shouldn’t know. Which in a sense was true, because each twin knew another person better and deeper than any of us ever could. It’s dangerous, that much knowledge. They understood each other’s breathing and cries in the night and were able quickly, silently, to comfort each other and developed their own language long before expressing any willingness to use ours. It separated them from the rest of us, and it bound them together. The twins were like the chimps. Dillon, too — inasmuch as he had an ability that we did not, an ability that might be dangerous.
At first, my daily routine was surprisingly liberating to me. Then oppressive. Never before had I been so free, yet never so confined and controlled by others. Controlled by Woodrow, of course, and to some small degree by Satterthwaite, whose responsibility was to be on call for any driving I might require. At Woodrow’s direction, Satterthwaite was to leave the office whenever I wanted or needed to go out, whether to the doctor, the market, or to the stores downtown, where there was very little on the shelves that I wanted or needed anyhow. As for our past indiscretion, Satterthwaite’s cynicism matched mine. An exciting risk, that’s all it had been. The same for him as for me. We’d chanced it, and we’d gotten away with it, and that moment, that exact degree of risk, would never appear again. The danger would always be greater and therefore not worth it, or less, and therefore not exciting enough. He remained a boy who was employed by my husband, and I was his boss’s wife and practically middle aged. Without once having to say it, we both knew the same thing.
I was controlled, too, by the people who worked for Woodrow at home — the yardman, Kuyo, until he left that job to work full time at the sanctuary; the many village girls and boys who came and went, working for a season or two and sometimes longer as housekeepers, laundresses, cooks, and drivers; and Jeannine, who was at first by herself the cook and maid and then became the nanny — all of whom actually answered to Woodrow, not to me, and knew their jobs better than I anyhow and didn’t need any supervision. So I made lists, menus, schedules; tried, ineptly, to help with the flower gardens; and shopped; and arranged entertainments — dinners, teas, lunches — for Woodrow’s colleagues and friends among the Americo-Liberian elite. I’d ended up with my mother’s life.
In those first years in Liberia, it was of course mostly my own doing, falling into my mother’s life. It was a thing difficult to avoid. As soon as we were married, Woodrow had insisted that I quit my job at the lab. Not “seemly” for the wife of a minister of government, he pronounced. And I complied. For a long while I had been eager to quit the lab anyhow and hadn’t already done it only because until now in the entire country of Liberia there was nothing else available to me, nothing for which I was not over- or underqualified. And, of course, there was the matter of the chimps, my dreamers.
Until I married and moved into Woodrow’s house, I had nowhere else to live than in my cabin at the lab. Before long, however, the job had changed for me, and to my surprise I had actually become attached to it. Attached to the chimps. In the beginning, the work had been suffused with tedium. Every day it was the same — a simple, mind-numbing set of tasks associated with recording and tracking plasma samples taken from the chimps and shipping the samples back to the U.S. for testing. The chimps had been deliberately infected, and the progress of the disease had to be recorded month by month, until the subject, the infected chimp, died, date and cause of death carefully recorded. They’d been infected at different ages, depending on when they’d been brought to the lab, and I noted that; and gender, duly noted; and background (subject’s general health before infection; conditions of birth, i.e., born and raised in the wild or captivity; birth order, if known; location of early habitat; place and means of capture…) — all duly noted.