But there was so much else that I could and should have been doing with my life then that it embarrasses and hurts me to be telling it now. For this I do feel guilt, and not mere embarrassment. What was I thinking? A woman in her mid-thirties, out from under the shadow of her parents at last, no longer underground or on the run, I was free to float, moved only by the current of my real character. And my character had led me into this quiet eddy of nearly stilled, slowly circling water. I’d washed up in a small, backward, provincial country in Africa, where I was a privileged member of the elite, not merely an expatriate or a foreign national employed by her government or by some huge American or European corporation, like all the other white people here. Distinct from the other whites in spite of my skin color, I was rather grandly financed by a man who held a high government position. I had three small children to keep me distracted and more or less busy, a handful of practically indentured servants to leave me time for naps and leisurely walks in my garden, a ready-made social circle of men like my husband and women whose roles matched mine, except for the fact that they were all native Liberians and preferred to keep relations with me, the unavoidable outsider, superficial and strictly social. I was neither one thing nor the other, neither expat nor Liberian national, and thus had no responsibilities to anyone but myself, my children, and my husband, who essentially made no more strenuous demands on me than a small den of Cub Scouts might make on their den mother.
And everyone wanted me to stay exactly where I was. You’re beautiful, Hannah darling, don’t ever change. Stay in your box. Woodrow liked boxes. He liked keeping his colleagues, his friends, his sons, me, and his people all in separate compartments, one stacked upon the other, like the cages that held the chimps. His life at home, his work at the ministry, and his political and associated social lives were one stack of boxes, which he kept in the city. A second stack he stashed in the bush, in Fuama, where, for all I knew, he had a second or even a third wife in a box and had other children, though he certainly never mentioned that possibility, and I did not ask. Nor was I at all clear as to where the box with me inside was positioned, other than in the city stack. Somewhere near the middle, probably, once we were married. That box, unbeknownst to me, was slipping gradually towards the bottom.
The Liberians we saw socially in Monrovia preferred to position me at the polite edge of their circle, men and women alike, which was understandable, given my ignorance of their deeper ways and experiences and our vast differences of background, and which was how I preferred it myself. It made it easier for me to keep track of who I really was, to keep my several not-quite-serial identities from overlapping or becoming confused with one another — Hannah Musgrave, Dawn Carrington, Hannah Darling, Mammi, Miz Sundiata, each with her own past, present, and, presumably, future. Since childhood, compartmentalizing had been one of my strengths, after all. That and numbers. Like Woodrow, perhaps. Not boxes inside of boxes, or in a vertical stack like his, but rather side by side, boxes next to boxes, a row of them stretching from one horizon of my awareness to the other. And I could slip unseen from one to the next, as if each had a secret doorway connected to the box beside it.
When I look back now, so many years later, an old lady sitting on her porch here in Keene Valley or sipping her beer at the Ausable Inn or out on the lawn in the shade of a maple tree, telling my story to a friend and remembering the world I lived in then, I know what I could and should have been doing with my time and riches and my abundant privileges. I was surrounded daily, after all, by abject poverty so pervasive and deeply embedded that, though I could never have alleviated it in the slightest, I could have altered significantly the lives of at least a few individuals, people to whom I was related by marriage, for instance, and people who worked for us, and even neighbors, for, although we lived in one of the poshest neighborhoods of Monrovia, there were huts and tiny, sweltering, tin-roofed cabins tucked into the warren of back alleys nearby that housed whole families just barely scraping by and always on the verge of starvation. But even within that small circle of desperately needy family members, friends, and neighbors, I provided no meaningful, lasting help. Whether the poverty inside that circle was truly unalterable, like that of the rest of the country, I couldn’t say even today, but it seemed to me then a fixed and hopelessly unfixable condition, as permanent and unalterable as a gene code.
Beyond that small circle, of course, poverty was indeed fixed. If I bothered to walk ten blocks beyond our Duport Road enclave, I’d find myself in the middle of a workers’ quarter jammed with mostly illiterate young men from the country, tens of thousands of them with only a farm boy’s skills who had drifted into the city to find work, and finding none, had stayed to see their lives die on the vine, unplucked. They became thieves, pickpockets, extortionists, and beggars. They became drunks and drug addicts. Or they joined the army solely for the shelter and clothing it promised, and because they almost never got paid, they continued to steal, extort, and beg, only now with a gun in their hands. Joining them, plying their trade on these narrow streets at night, were loosely organized troops of prostitutes, most of them girls from the country following the boys, or girls kicked out of their villages by their husbands for having gotten pregnant in adultery or by their parents for having gotten pregnant out of wedlock. There were the so-called rope hotels, muddy, room-size squares of ground surrounded by a head-high cinder-block wall with a thatched roof on poles. Inside the walls, at the height of an adult’s armpit, ropes were strung like clothesline across the enclosed space. For a dime, a homeless man or woman could drape his or her weight over the rope like a blanket and sleep all night, dry and more or less safe from the dangerous streets and alleys. Babies, naked and crusted with fly-spotted sores played listlessly in puddles of sewage. Vast midden heaps at the edge of the city were ringed by settlements of huts made from refrigerator cartons, the rusted carcasses of wrecked cars, cast-off doors and broken crates — whole villages of human scavengers sifting the towering, constantly expanding piles for scraps of cloth or paper that could be used or sold, kids and old women fighting with the rats and packs of wild dogs for bits of tossed-out food. It all seemed so hopeless to me that I averted my gaze. I did not want to see what I could not begin to change.
Yet at any time, once my babies were born, I could have put my shoulder to the wheel of one or several of the dozens of volunteer and non-governmental charitable organizations that were stuck to their hubs in the mud of Liberian corruption, cynicism, and sloth. I could have distributed condoms, medical supplies, food, clean water, information. It was eight years between my marriage to Woodrow and my first return to America (an event I’ll tell you about very soon), and in those years I could have taught a hundred adults to read. I could have bribed a hundred parents to keep their daughters from working in the fields or on the streets and paid for the girls’ secondary-school education. I could have been a one-woman Peace Corps with no nationalist agenda, a one-woman charity with no religious program, a one-woman relief agency with no bureaucracy or salaried administrators to answer to. It wouldn’t have changed the world or human nature, and probably wouldn’t have altered a single sentence in the history of Liberia. But it would have changed me. And, a different person, I might have avoided some of the harm I inflicted later both on myself and others.