“It can be arranged, of course,” Woodrow said. “Bit of a turnaround, though, wouldn’t you say?”
We were at dinner at home, eating on the patio, the five of us, a peaceful moonlit evening at the end of the rainy season. For the first time in months, I could hear the dry clatter of the palms in the warm breeze. “Don’t jump the gun,” I said to him and poured myself a third glass of wine. The boys had left the table and were being bathed now by Jeannine. “I’m only giving the idea some idle consideration,” I explained. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately, maybe because hitting forty makes me realize how old they are. I’ve started to worry about their health, actually. And I’m feeling more guilt with each passing year, Woodrow. Guilt for the distance between us. And there’s the boys to think of. Really. I don’t want the boys to grow up without knowing anything more about my parents than they would if I were an orphan.”
“Ah, well, that’s true for me, too, you know.” Woodrow lighted a Dunhill cigarette, pushed back his chair, and crossed his legs. He watched me carefully, as if he thought something new and puzzling might be happening here.
“The boys know your parents. It’s mine I’m talking about.”
“I mean that I myself sometimes think of you as an orphan. But you’re not, are you?”
Most of what Woodrow knew of my past he’d learned years ago, when I first came over from Ghana, from a small sheaf of information gleaned from that file folder slipped to him by the same American cultural attaché, Sam Clement. I didn’t know what was in that file and wasn’t sure I wanted to know, so hadn’t asked. It wasn’t until nearly a year after we were married that Woodrow had actually showed me the folder, and he did it for his reasons, not mine.
He brought it from his office one afternoon and carried it out to the lab compound, where I was sitting at my desk logging genealogical data on the baby chimps. He dropped the folder on top of my logbook, and I opened and read through it quickly and in silence, while he sat on the corner of my cluttered desk and waited. An oscillating fan on the desk hummed and drifted back and forth, riffling the papers in the folder. It wasn’t much, barely two single-spaced, typed pages and fuzzy copies of the photos used for the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1970, after the Greenwich Village townhouse bombing that sent me and the entire Weather cohort permanently underground.
I sighed heavily at the sight of my old face. It brought me reluctantly to grieve all over again for someone I’d loved and whose death I thought I’d gotten over, not the three friends who’d been killed in the explosion — I never really knew them more than slightly from the various national SDS conventions — but the late, unlamented Hannah Musgrave. Here it all was again: the names and dates, the tired facts of my biography up to then, the description of my few skills and talents. It was the CV of a small-time, would-be domestic terrorist. Sad. Pathetic.
“Why are you showing this to me now? You had it when I got here, when I first came over from Accra, didn’t you?”
“You’re my wife now. If I’m ever asked, I should know what’s true and what’s a lie. In case I have to defend you. I’ve seen files like this before, you know; the president has a cabinet stuffed with files just like this, and they’re mostly lies, lies and false confessions. But bits and pieces are true.”
“Yes,” I said. “But everything’s pretty much true, what’s in there.”
“Pretty much?”
“Except … well, except that I never knew what was happening anywhere other than where I myself happened to be, and I wasn’t responsible for anything that I didn’t do personally. Which wasn’t much, believe me. We weren’t that stupid or naive. We were in these small cells, what we called foco groups, and mine was in New Bedford, Massachusetts. So when that townhouse blew up and killed those three people, I was as shocked as everyone else. I hadn’t heard from any of those people in years, didn’t even know if they were still part of Weather or not. Same with the Pentagon bombing and most of the others. The New York police stations. All of them, actually. That was the idea, to keep the cells separate. Only the three or four people at the top — the Weather Bureau, we called them — knew what all the cells were supposed to be doing, and they knew only in a general way. We were instructed to invent and implement our own individual attacks on the government cell by cell. Some of the cells were really creative and bold. But others, like mine, were incompetent and timid and more or less driven by fantasy. You have to understand, Woodrow, most of us were like actors in a play that on a barely conscious level was mainly about disappearing. About breaking with your past. You know?”
“Your past. I don’t understand.”
“Well, that was me, husband. I was mainly trying to break from my past. Of course, what I thought I was doing…”
“What was wrong with your past?” Woodrow interrupted. “I mean, that you wanted to break from it?”
He was never going to get it. No matter what I said or how far back in my life I went with him, my pain and sorrow and my anger and shame were too weirdly American for Woodrow to grasp what had transformed me from a college coed worried about keeping her real name on the dean’s list to a hard-as-nails terrorist on the run under a false name. Or what had transformed the terrorist into the two-named wife — three names, actually — of the Liberian minister of public health, the mother of his sons. How could he be expected to get those changes when I barely understood them myself? If I told him everything that had been left out of that thin folder, if I made the story of my life real to him, like I’m trying to do for you, he’d be afraid, rightly, that I could be transformed yet again into something equally strange. Or even changed back into what I had been before. The coed. The political activist. The fantasist. The maker of bombs.
I wasn’t going to put that fear onto him, I decided, not after all he’d done for me so far and showed every sign of continuing to do. Despite all, Woodrow was a good and generous man, there was no denying it, and I loved those qualities in him and benefited from them and fully expected to benefit from them for the rest of my life. I was not altogether sure, even early in our marriage, that I loved him, however. The essential Woodrow. Whoever, whatever, that was.
I understood, perhaps better than he, that I could no more make sense of his past than he could mine. We were a husband and wife who could not imagine the texture and content of each other’s consciousness as they had existed prior to the day we first met. Woodrow, too, had been transformed many times. A boy from a West African village had turned into an American college student, a black-skinned foreigner with an exotic accent, a young man who, in time, had become a Liberian cabinet minister married to a white American woman. If I knew his story, the whole of it, I, too, might be frightened by the possibility of still farther transformations to come. What if he became again the boy from a West African village? He seemed on the verge of it whenever we visited Fuama. What if he still secretly was that boy, now become a man, with a second and third wife and still maintained sexual control over his female cousins and nieces? Not just Jeannine. Or became again the black African college boy imitating the white American college boys, drinking too much, playing with drugs, screwing the coeds whether they liked it or not? I’d known some African students like that at Brandeis, although most of them had been enrolled elsewhere, the technical and business schools in Cambridge and Boston proper, out looking for hot, guilt-ridden, liberal white girls turned on by negritude but scared of American blacks.
Consequently, neither I nor Woodrow had sought to learn the other’s story. The rough outline, a few typed pages in a file folder, was enough. No details necessary. No late-night connubial reminiscing for Mr. and Mrs. Sundiata. No lengthy descriptions of anyone other than the husband and wife sitting across from each other at the table right this moment, the man and the woman lingering over the last of the evening’s wine, with the dinner dishes and serving bowls cluttering the space between them, palm trees flipping their fronds in the breezy dark, tree frogs advertising their wares, the giggles and splashes of the boys in their bath, and Jeannine’s low, monitoring scold as she hurries them to dry and into their American pajamas, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Pluto.