It began shortly before I passed by the harbor in the car one morning on the way to the lab, which was located on the south side of the city near the JFK Hospital. As we approached the harbor front, we saw black clouds of smoke pouring into the gray sky. There were tires burning in the lot beside the dockside warehouse, and large crowds knotted around the fires, people shouting at one another, as if angry at themselves, rather than the president. They shook their fists, men and women alike, their faces dark with anger.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked Satterthwaite, more curious than frightened.
Satterthwaite half-turned in front and said, “It on account of the tax.”
“What tax?” I asked.
“Ten cents a pound for rice. President Tolbert say it this mornin’ on the radio.”
A battered pickup truck with a half-dozen men in the back waving machetes crossed suddenly in front of the Mercedes. Satterthwaite hit the brakes and swerved away, bumping over the curb onto the harbor-front parking lot. Another vehicle, a small red taxi, pulled in behind us, and the pickup truck followed us over the curb onto the lot, swerved, and stopped in front, effectively blocking the Mercedes. The driver and another man jumped down from the pickup to the pavement and walked towards us.
“Don’t get out, don’t open the window, don’t say nothin’,” Satterthwaite said. I heard the door locks automatically clunk into place.
A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded the car. They began to rock it from side to side and bang on the trunk and hood with their fists like hammers. Most of them were shirtless, unshaven, their hair in long, springy coils. They waved their machetes and stared wild eyed into the back of the car, trying to see through the tinted glass — though I could see plainly enough their detonating faces, huge and black and wet with rain.
Two of the men thumped purposefully on Satterthwaite’s window, the leaders, evidently, ordinary workingmen in tee shirts and loose trousers. They had the faces of men who wished to negotiate. Satterthwaite lowered his window a few inches and spoke rapidly to them in pidgin.
In response, the men were shouting at Satterthwaite, as angry as the others now, apparently confused or not believing him, but he kept talking rapidly in a calm, low voice, until finally they grew quiet and listened and then at last instructed the others to back off. Satterthwaite turned and explained, “Them think we come from the president to tell the ship to give the rice to the government. Them think we the tax collectors, but now they see who we are, Miz Sundiata and her driver, so them say it all right for us to go.”
“Thank you,” I said.
It went suddenly quiet inside the car again, and the pickup pulled away from the Mercedes, freeing us to leave. Satterthwaite put the car in gear and inched forward and gave a gentle, grateful wave to the men, who politely, almost apologetically waved back.
At that moment, as if they’d been watching and waiting for us to leave the scene, a pair of army trucks filled with helmeted soldiers appeared, engines grinding, and blocked the departure of all three vehicles, the pickup, the red taxi, and the Mercedes. Two jeeps braked to a quick stop beside our car, and dozens of soldiers jumped from the trucks and jeeps and dragged the drivers from the pickup and the taxi, beating the heads and faces of the men with rifle butts, sending their now pathetic-looking machetes clattering to the pavement, kicking the men, rolling their bodies away from the Mercedes like logs. Blood sprayed from noses, ears, broken mouths, and from inside the car I heard muffled howls cut by the sound of human bones being cracked and splintered. The wild men with machetes who moments ago had terrified me were transformed with terrible efficiency into sacks and tossed into the rear of the trucks.
I yelled at Satterthwaite, “For God’s sake, get us out of here!”
A soldier waved us on. Satterthwaite hit the accelerator, and in seconds we were back on Gamba Boulevard, headed south and out of the city. I gazed out the windows through the steady rain at the nearly empty streets and alleys. Abruptly, halfway to the lab, I told Satterthwaite to turn around and drive me home. “Take the back way, stay out of town,” I said.
And so it was back to the bubble, then. When we pulled into the yard, Woodrow was standing at the door, arms folded across his chest, waiting. The dogs posed alertly beside him like sentries. He’d returned home from the ministry as soon as he learned from the radio what had happened down at the docks and was now spreading to all parts of the city.
We watched and listened to the Rice Riot, as it came to be called, from behind the high, gated wall that surrounded our home on Duport Road. The riot sprawled uphill from the waterfront, as the crowd of ordinary folks broke away from the soldiers sent to subdue them quickly became a mob led and egged on by gangs of boys and young men drunk on palm wine and high on marijuana and Lord knows what else. They stormed up the long ridge into the center of town, smashing windows and burning trash, then looting stores, dressing in looted clothing and lugging TVs, radios, tape decks, electric fans, and blenders like trophies. They overturned cars, massed in the squares and at crossroads, swelling in size and noise as they went, beating on stolen pails and cook pans, blowing whistles, chanting, dancing. It was a headless beast, thrashing in pain and confusion.
Woodrow and I and the boys, Satterthwaite, Jeannine and Kuyo, we all peered from behind the barred windows of the house and watched the smoke rise in smudged clouds, billowing skyward through the rain, first from one district, then from another, more distant district, and felt relieved that the rioters seemed to be moving south and west, away from our neighborhood and in the direction of the Liberian government buildings and the foreign embassies, towards the dead end of palm-lined Gamba Boulevard, where the bright white Executive Mansion ruled, as if the beast were moving blindly, instinctively, towards the source of its pain.
It was unclear, however, what the mob expected to do once it reached the palace. Stand outside in the thousands and raise their fists in anger and frustration? Try to tell of their sorrow and pain and hunger, their fear of having to watch their children die? Tell the foreigners of their plight, yes, tell the world, if possible, but especially tell the president, the hulking, glowering man in the blue, pinstriped Savile Row suit and exquisite Italian necktie, who looked down from his office window, gazed across the mint-green lawns and gardens to the ten-foot-high wall of wrought-iron spikes protecting the palace grounds from the street, where his people cried out and clung to the iron bars and banged against them with sticks, machetes, and fists. Tell the president, who, after a few moments of contemplating the crowd, its growing size, its fury and suicidal desperation — suicidal because they had come to the Executive Mansion, the most protected building in the country, where they had effectively trapped themselves in a cul-de-sac against an iron wall — walked calmly from the window to his desk, picked up the telephone, and called his minister of security.
Shortly after that, clanking and snorting like mechanical bulls, the tanks appeared, three of them, grinding along the boulevard towards the huge crowd, slowly passing the European and Israeli and American embassies, whose gates were locked shut from inside, the bridges over the moats raised, and behind the tanks marched a battalion of soldiers from the president’s security force. These grim men were not regular army enlistees. They came helmeted, wearing full battle gear, carrying M-16s and AK-47s. These men were not riot police, like the men we battled in Chicago in ’68 and ’69. They weren’t National Guardsmen, ill-trained reservists given unfamiliar weapons and called unexpectedly to duty, like the frightened boys who’d shot students at Kent State. No, these were men who were trained and armed and brought out of their barracks today for one purpose only, to shoot down as many people as their officers ordered, even if they had to run down and fire point-blank at members of their own tribe, killing their friends and neighbors, possibly even family members, men, women, and children, all of them unarmed, helpless against the tanks and guns.