All night long, I waited to hear from my husband — a phone call or, more likely, as I persisted in thinking, his actual return, angry and humiliated by his treatment at the hands of the leader and his one-time friend, Charles Taylor. You may prefer not to know this about me, but secretly, deep in the dark chambers of my many-chambered heart, Woodrow’s arrest pleased me. It wasn’t very wifely of me, I know, and it certainly was not in my best interests or my sons’, for we were as dependent on Woodrow as his niece Jeannine was. The entire household, even the chimps, were dependent on the man. He had insisted on it. It was, especially for Woodrow, the only way to live together, it was the African way, and all of us, Jeannine and Kuyo and I, had happily complied.
I sat there on the couch and considered my situation and how helpless I had suddenly become. I remembered my vows as a teenage girl and later as a grown woman never, never to become dependent on a man’s fate. I’d seen early on how it had paralyzed my mother, and from that vantage point, still a girl’s, I had looked ahead at what the world would offer me when I became a woman, and had pledged that I would take it only on my own terms. I would gladly accept from a man responsibility, commitment, recompense, and reward, but only if they were reciprocal and I were free to walk away from the man when and if he broke the contract or became a danger to me. The years in the Movement from college on had only reinforced this pledge, educating me as to its inextricable link to my personal freedom. I fought with my male classmates at Brandeis, who called me a bitch, a dyke, a cock-teasing, ball-busting feminist; and I argued with and sternly critiqued my male comrades in SDS and Weather, the boys who called themselves men and the women girls and said they really appreciated my contribution to the discussion, but let’s go back to my room and fuck and then you can make breakfast for me in the morning. Later, underground, I demanded of my cellmates total upfront clarity and agreement on splitting equally all financial, household, and childcare responsibilities and labor, even when the child was not mine and neither of the parents my lover.
Lord, all those vows, all those promises and contracts — broken, abandoned, nearly forgotten! Throughout the night, I lay in bed waiting for Woodrow’s return, for, all evidence to the contrary, I still believed that this was, at worst, another of the leader’s ways of intimidating and keeping loyal one of the most loyal members of his government. The other members of his government, more dangerous than Woodrow, had long since been disposed of. It was a move typical of Samuel Doe. He was famous for it. Arrest the man for a night, and send his best friend and fellow minister to do the job. It’ll keep the both of them in line.
While I waited, tossing restlessly beneath the gauzy mosquito netting, I let myself play out little scenarios, dimly lit fantasies that up to now I’d kept pretty much hidden from myself, like a secret stash of pornography tucked in the dark back corner of a closet. I saw myself settled in a small house, like the old Firestone cottage I’d lived in when I first arrived in Liberia, only with an extra bedroom for the boys to share, and located a few miles inland from Monrovia. The four of us would take care of the chimps, my dreamers. That’s all, a simple life. I’d school the boys at home, and I’d read to them at night, and they’d play with the children of the village, while I socialized with the other mothers, went to market with them, and cooked native food the native way on my own. A very simple life. Just me and the boys and the dreamers and the villagers and the jungle.
And when I grew tired of that fantasy, or it grew too complicated and was no longer sustainable, I envisioned a life here in town, a continuation of my present life, except that now Woodrow was no longer a part of my life, and I was free to be the white American woman with three brown sons living in the big white house on Duport Road with the view of the bay, the woman who ran the sanctuary for the chimpanzees, the woman with the mysterious past who could never return to her native land, who was occasionally seen at one of the better restaurants in town on the arm of an official from one of the European embassies, was sometimes mentioned in the society column of the Post as one of the guests at an embassy party. Or even, why not, seen dancing at a Masonic ball with Minister Charles Taylor. Which would indeed complicate things, no?
Fantasies of escape really are like pornography. They have to remain simple and untainted by reality, or they cause anxiety. I imagined myself and my sons, all three wearing small backpacks, Americans in Africa, as they board a plane at Robertsfield, leaving Liberia. Then here we are departing from the plane after it has landed at Logan Airport, in Boston. My mother and father, unchanged after all these years, greet us at the gate. Embraces and tears of joy and mutual forgiveness all around. No one else is there, except for other arriving passengers and the people waiting to greet them. No reporters covering the return of a one-time fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, the last of the Weather Underground come in from the cold. No U.S. Marshals or FBI agents to arrest me. No customs officer asking to see our passports and confiscating mine.
It would be simple, oh so simple, if Woodrow stayed arrested — stopped, frozen in time at this moment, and not jailed or tortured or beaten or killed, not shot dead by one of those iron-headed men with the AK-47s, big, cold-eyed men from the country. I didn’t want that. As I lay there in my bed and dawn light slid through the shuttered windows, as pepperbirds started their pre-morning ruckus, my tumbling fantasies gradually slowed and then, top-heavy with growing complexity, ceased to move. They buckled under the weight of reality and collapsed. Leaving me to contemplate the undeniable fact. My husband had been arrested by the most powerful man in the country, a man who, with impunity and without reason, was more than capable of killing him. And where would that leave me, me and my children?
BY DAWN THE SOLDIER guarding us had disappeared from the yard. And Jeannine and Kuyo, I discovered, had fled during the night — not until after Kuyo had removed the bodies of the dogs, I noticed, and Jeannine had swept up the broken glass. They’d gone back to Fuama, where, by noon, news of the arrest of Woodrow Sundiata, the village’s one big man in Monrovia, would have sent every member of Woodrow’s immediate family into hiding, where they’d stay for as long as it appeared that Woodrow was an enemy of the leader, even if it meant hiding in the bush for years or until the leader was overthrown and replaced.
I didn’t care, I was glad they were gone from the compound. Their presence, no matter how useful their service, oppressed me. Their role in my life, even after all these years, had never clarified itself. They weren’t servants or employees, nor were they family members, the kind you can count on in a crisis to provide aid and comfort. I didn’t know what they were, or who. They weren’t even hangers-on, the sort of people you can shoo away when they’ve become a burden or a bore.