“I’ll fix you some chicken,” Jeannine said and headed for the kitchen.
“Fine, fine, fine. I’ll eat it in here!” he hollered.
“Good night, Woodrow,” I said, and turned and walked slowly down the hallway to my bed. I wondered if the symptoms of alcoholism were different for Africans than for Americans, for blacks than for whites. A drunk is a drunk, I decided, regardless of his race or culture.
A while later, from the bedroom, I smelled paper burning. The living room fireplace was mostly for decorative purposes and had a lousy draft, but was cheering on a rain-chilled evening. Woodrow was cleaning out his files, erasing paper trails that might link him to the doomed and despised president and his inner circle, a circle that Woodrow had for so long tried to join but that, despite his best efforts at flattery, servility, and faithfulness, had rebuffed him. No wonder he seemed almost pleased by the coup. No wonder he’d cackled with delight at the prospect of his good friend Charles Taylor’s triumphant return.
Sometime later, I was wakened by a woman’s light laugh. Jeannine’s? Then silence. I could still smell the smoke of burnt paper, but it was old, cold smoke now. It was nearly dawn, birds were making their first chirps, and Woodrow still hadn’t come in to bed. Then I heard that all-too-familiar thumping, the sound of my headboard being bumped against the wall by Woodrow’s tireless thrusting — only this time, for the first time, it wasn’t my bed, our bed, and the wall wasn’t the one behind my pillow. I knew at once that Woodrow was with Jeannine, and the bed was hers, the wall the one behind her head in the small room beyond the boys’ bedroom. I lay there curled on my side like a question mark, listening, unable to shut out the sound of my husband fucking his niece, my sons’ nanny, my friend, perhaps the only human friend I had in those days. And did I want to do the normal thing — leap from my bed, run down the hall, fling open the door to Jeannine’s room, and shriek bloody murder at the treacherous bitch and bastard adulterer of a husband? Did I want to expose and humiliate them both? Would my relationship with the two of them be forever changed?
No. None of it. It was as if they had been doing this for years, since the first week of our marriage, and I had come to accept it as normal and even necessary. Simply, it was how we lived now, Woodrow and the boys and I. And, of course, it was payback for my little tryst with Satterthwaite. We were all adulterers. I knew that, restless, agitated, still exhilarated by having come so close to death and escaped, Woodrow had walked into Jeannine’s room and slid into her bed, spread her legs, and begun to fuck her. He was exercising his prerogative as head of the household, and she had merely accepted his heavy, sweating presence atop her as natural and inevitable. I grabbed Woodrow’s pillow and covered my ears with it, muffling the sound of his betrayal and Jeannine’s easy compliance.
A moment of relative silence, the only sound my own throbbing pulse, and then the thumping of Jeannine’s bed against the wall gradually began to filter through the pillow, and I could hear them again. I took the pillow away and lay on my back listening, as on and on it went, like the steadily pounding piston of an engine, while the ground doves outside my window began to gurgle and pepperbirds began to sing, a rooster crowed, a car drove slowly past the house, and someone in the house next door, in the kitchen just beyond the terrace outside our bedroom, turned on the radio. A man was speaking from the radio, his voice a weird blend of authority and confusion — Samuel Doe, the new head of state for the Republic of Liberia. He was announcing the execution of the president and the arrest of fifteen traitors and giving the time and place of their upcoming public execution.
Later that day, in a now-infamous episode, Sergeant Doe and his men hauled thirteen of the ministers, the Supreme Court justice, and the major general who had run the president’s security apparatus down to the beach a mile south of the city, where, before a huge, cheering crowd, they erected fifteen telephone poles in the sand, stripped their victims, most of them fat, old men, to their underwear, tied them to the poles, and shot them literally to pieces. The executioners were drunk, and consequently had to fire hundreds of rounds into the bodies to be sure that the old men were dead. Many in the crowd snapped photos and videotaped the event, and all day long, with loudspeakers mounted on truck beds blaring juju and reggae, the people sang and danced in drunken celebration, while buzzards circled overhead and small yellow dogs worked their way closer and closer to the fly-blown carcasses tied to the poles — meat rotting in the sun.
THOUGH WORSE WAS to come, 1983, my eighth year in Liberia, was a hard one for me. But who knew what was coming? Certainly I didn’t. I was forty now and honestly believed that the truly difficult part of my life was behind me. Oh, sure, I knew I’d have to face individual crises in the future — who doesn’t? My three sons, as they grew into adolescence and beyond, were bound to create episodes of fear and trembling; my marriage to Woodrow someday soon would have to withstand the blows of middle-age, mine as much as his, and the eventual departure of the boys from home, and the culmination, disappointing, of Woodrow’s career, for I knew by then, even though he’d been made minister, a full member of the cabinet, that he was never going to get inside the inner circle of power that was now centered on Samuel Doe. I was already hearing anxious grumbles from Woodrow about my own career — although I still hesitated to call it that, my work with the chimps, my dreamers.
But I pictured these coming events and crises as separate beads on a string, individually not too heavy to bear, collectively merely the defining weight of a life, my life, anyone’s. In the last year, however, I’d begun to believe that all my future dark days, like those of most people I knew, even here in Liberia, would be matched about evenly by future days of brightness. Darkness would be canceled by light, neutralized, evened off, so that when I grew old and died, I’d come out at zero. In the game of life, all I expected, all I hoped for, was to come out even, a zero-sum game.
These aren’t low expectations for a life, exactly. They aren’t high, either. But for me, as I entered my forty-first year, my expectations and hopes had at last met one another and were a solid fit, a balanced scale, yin and yang, hand in glove. No more dreams of revolution, no more millenarian expectations, no more longing for utopia. I called my newly achieved state of mind realism and almost never used words like bourgeois anymore. I was standing on solid ground now. Terra firma. Yes, indeed — realism. My mother and father were still afloat in clouds of unknowing, maybe, but I had finally created for myself a life that neither imitated theirs nor stood in simple reaction to it. After all these years, I could say to myself that I had freed myself from my parents. It may have taken rather too long, but I’d done it.
I’d even begun talking with Woodrow about returning to the States with the boys to visit my parents. Their American grandparents. Could he arrange it with the American embassy, possibly through the cultural officer? Whatzisname, Sam Clement? Or could he speak informally to the U.S. ambassador himself about issuing a passport for Dawn Sundiata, née Carrington, with the boys traveling on Woodrow’s Liberian VIP passport, so there’d be no nasty surprises when we arrived in the States?