American Warlord (5 page)

The men spared the president’s wife, who belonged to the indigenous Vai tribe.

According to the lone surviving American embassy official present in Monrovia, the killing of the president was no cathartic purgation of tribal hatred.
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It was little more than a drunken lark, undertaken by a handful of underpaid and aggrieved soldiers. Within hours of the president’s murder, Col. Robert Gosney appeared on scene at the Executive Mansion. There he found the members of the junta, not celebrating their victory, but disoriented and terrified, sulking in a pagoda outside of the mansion. It was a dangerous situation: the capital threatened to spin out of control without a clear line of authority.

“Is there anyone there that could run the government?” his boss, the chargé d’affaires, radioed him.

“I reckon there is,” the colonel responded. Gosney was familiar with some of the men from training they had received from U.S. Special Forces weeks before the coup. By his own account, Gosney lined up the men and appointed them roles in the junta according to their rank. His account can’t be independently verified (the others present are deceased), but it is known that two men within this group, Master Sgt. Samuel Kanyon Doe and Sgt. Thomas Quiwonkpa, emerged as the most powerful figures in Liberia. Each would shape Taylor’s development as a political force.

Both leaders came from tribal backgrounds—Doe was a Krahn tribesman from Grand Gedeh County in Liberia’s southeast, and Quiwonkpa was a Gio from Nimba County along the eastern border. Both men had little schooling but were professional soldiers. Doe became the president and Quiwonkpa the head of the armed forces for a new government, the People’s Redemption Council. Together they represented a new idea for Liberia: indigenous rule.

The coup dismantled the power structure that had ruled over Liberia for more than a century and simultaneously awakened tribalism as a political force. For ordinary Liberians, the world was turned on its head: the elite became the hunted, the disenfranchised became powerful. The tension in Liberian society had been building toward such a reversal for generations, but when it finally came, the change was spontaneous, not the result of an organized coup plot. The violence that followed in the days after Tolbert’s murder was shocking: thirteen cabinet members and government ministers were gunned down at a military camp before a firing squad. The one thing that remained consistent was support from the United States. The Reagan administration, once it was convinced of the Doe regime’s anti-Soviet leanings, began plying the new government with military and economic support.

For Bernice in America, the news likely confirmed that the political change that Charles and his friends had agitated for was being realized. It wasn’t clear where Taylor would fit within this violent new order, but he couldn’t have been too far from the action. Even as she moved on with her life, rumors about Taylor surfaced perennially: that he’d returned to the United States, that he’d been arrested and then broken from prison. She was left to wonder whether he was somehow connected to the crisis back in his country.

But Bernice ultimately decided that what happened in Liberia was not relevant to the family she was trying to hold together. The father to her child had disappeared, and apparently it would be better if he remained in the void. By 1987 she and her new husband had decided to leave Boston—leaving her daughter Maisha behind with her grandparents—to raise Chucky in Florida, far from his birthplace and far from wherever his father would think to look for him.
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Pine Hills was a stretch of suburban Orlando crafted from an idealized vision of America. Developed in the 1950s as tracts of tidy, affordable single-family homes on open farmland west of downtown, the neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs were built around fixtures of middle-class Floridian life: the community golf course, the swimming pool, and the shopping mall.
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In the 1950s a typical Pine Hills resident held a job at nearby Lockheed Martin and could comfortably afford a $4,000 starter home. In nearly all cases, a Pine Hills resident was white.

As the civil rights movement developed and desegregation became law during the 1960s and 1970s, the racial tensions of the era were keenly felt in Pine Hills. The neighborhood, although part of relatively metropolitan Orlando, was a segregated southern community. The local Ku Klux Klan remained entrenched in the Orange County government and sheriff’s office until the 1950s, and until the 1960s many home titles in the neighborhood contained the provision that the property could not be sold to a black owner. In 1973 Pine Hills residents openly protested school busing aimed to desegregate their school systems. But just seven years later, in 1980, the
Orlando Sentinel
would describe Pine Hills as “the leading edge of racial change in the Orlando area.” Over the course of the 1980s, white residents would flee the neighborhood in droves, dropping from 91 percent of the residents in 1981 to just 28 percent in 2000.

In April 1987 Bernice purchased a two-story home on a quiet street off a county road in Pine Hills.
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(Though she was married to Roy, the deed listed her as “unmarried.”) The Belfasts’ appearance on the block was part of a larger migration of West Indian families from the Northeast to Orlando. When Chucky entered school, however, he found that his background carried some stigma. The children drew cultural lines not just between island kids and locals but also between “northerners” and Floridians.
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A rise in crime rates contributed to the tensions in the area.
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In the late 1980s Orlando, like other U.S. cities, suffered a lethal combination of children and guns. By the early 1990s Pine Hills became a front line in this crisis. Local teens formed gangs like the Hiawassee Posse, the Pork n’ Beans gang, and the Pine Hill Boys. These crews resembled groups of neighborhood friends more than organized street gangs like those in Los Angeles and Chicago. Local cops attributed the trend to popular movies like
Colors
, which depicted—and glamorized—gang culture and violence. But as these groups acquired guns—and began using them—the distinction mattered little to local law enforcement. The Orange County sheriff’s department created a task force called the Alpha Team to deal with the emerging problem.
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In 1990 the local police began officially counting drive-by shootings—a phenomenon that had been a novelty just two years earlier. By 1991 the office tracked twenty-six drive-bys among the more than two thousand shootings countywide. At times, the law enforcement response drew controversy. In 1991 Orange County sheriff’s deputies shot three Pine Hills teens—the youngest, fifteen years old—during a robbery sting. The incident drew public recriminations and prompted Florida’s governor to call for an investigation into the use of police force.

This violence was not abstract for Chucky, whose neighborhood became known as “Crime Hills.” Children were forced to adopt the sort of self-preservation tactics that were more familiar in inner cities. As a young teen, he had to stake out his name among the neighborhood kids. Having grown from a lanky adolescent into a huskier teen, he soon developed the reputation as a tough kid in a tough crowd—as one former girlfriend said, “an alpha among alphas.” Schoolyard legends surrounded him: according to one, Chucky took on a crowd of Floridians who had singled him out as a northerner, holding them off alone with a brick. All this translated into problems at school, which eventually landed Chucky in a high school for discipline cases.

Meanwhile, shortly after their arrival in Orlando, Chucky’s parents’ relationship began to deteriorate.
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From the day of their wedding in 1983, their marriage had had baggage: Roy’s unresolved divorce from his prior marriage, Bernice’s marriage to a hairdresser in 1989 (while she remained married to Roy), and eventually Bernice’s suspicions that Roy was unfaithful and spending all the family’s money on other women. Eventually Roy moved out of the family home to a smaller house several miles away. But the issue that pushed the marriage over the edge was neither infidelity nor money problems: it was Charles Taylor.

In late 1989 Chucky’s father reappeared halfway across the world. He was no longer an angry student activist but a smooth-talking and charismatic face of an inscrutable war in the jungles of Africa. Bernice and Roy’s instincts told them to distance their son even further from him. In the weeks after Taylor launched his first assault into Liberian territory, the couple brought the child before a family court judge and asked to change his name. He took the name of the man who had raised him, Roy Belfast. The name didn’t take, however; few called the boy by any other name than “Chucky.”
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Taylor, meanwhile, had not forgotten his American son. A year or two later, as Bernice recounts the story, she returned home one day, and Chucky told her, “My dad called.”
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Something in his voice told her that he wasn’t referring to the man who had raised him. But she could only ask her son, “Who’s your dad?”

More than a century earlier, on a mid-December afternoon in 1871, the
Edith Rose
moored in Monrovia.
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It was a black-hulled trading barque out of New York, with sixteen sails drawn from its three towering masts. It carried 243 Americans on a journey to start a new life in Liberia. The nation’s half-century-old capital sat hard on a peninsula of bone-white-sand beaches and belled palm trees, which formed a natural barrier between the Atlantic and the wetlands of the Mesurado River. The ship arrived at the height of the region’s dry season. An equatorial sun hovered brightly in the sky, obscured only by swiftly moving packs of low silver clouds. The landing of the
Edith Rose
was like the many others that had preceded it since the settlers first arrived in 1822, but it remained distinct in that those aboard were fleeing not slavery but the violent prospect of living as free blacks in the American South.

Liberia’s creation story had begun centuries earlier, when it existed only as a vast territory situated just above the equator, between four and eight degrees north latitude along the Atlantic coast. This territory stretched outward from the swampy Atlantic coastal plain into rolling green hills ringed by mist, toward an interior of more than twelve million acres of dense rain forest, eventually rising up into a range of gray, cool mountains and highlands near the western border. The interior held riches that would increase in value over the centuries: diamonds, timber, iron ore, and rubber. Eventually two colonies would draw boundaries around it: Sierra Leone, an English possession, to the north, and Ivory Coast, belonging to the French, to the south. The territory was the ancestral home to nearly sixteen indigenous tribes, speaking as many languages; some had hunted and fished along the shores for millennia, while others had migrated across the Sahel through Mali and Guinea. But until the first Europeans arrived in the late fifteenth century, this mysterious, verdant inland expanse was to them little more than undiscovered, uncharted, and dangerous territory.

The first European contact on the Liberian coast occurred when a Portuguese explorer named Pedro de Cintra came ashore in approximately 1461.
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De Cintra immediately discovered a valuable commodity: an abundance of melegueta pepper, which the locals used to season food. He also encountered an insurmountable language barrier with the indigenous tribes who lived along the coast. As a way to document his discovery, the explorer kidnapped a tribesman and brought him back to Lisbon, hoping this man would elaborate on this strange and unknown land to geographers there. The journey north did little to make the two men more comprehensible to each other, and after the ship arrived in Lisbon, the geographers fared no better in understanding the tribesman. After some time—and with the help of a slave woman—their interrogations were finally able to reveal one fact of this unexplored land: it was home to unicorns.

But the market was for slaves rather than unicorns, and a slave trade soon flourished along what became known as the Grain Coast, after the grains of the melegueta pepper. Over the next two centuries, the coastal tribes became not only fluent and experienced providers of slaves to Portuguese and Spanish traders but also seasoned combatants in the internecine wars that came with competition in the trade.

Slavery would also connect this territory to the people of the United States. The American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, or simply the American Colonization Society, saw in this uncolonized region a solution to the legacy of American slavery.

The society, which fashioned itself a progressive philanthropic group, came into being on December 21, 1816, at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C., where a handful of white American clergy, judges, and congressional leaders gathered to plot out a solution to what many viewed as a developing domestic crisis: the growing numbers of free blacks.
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The group provided a nexus for all manner of contemporary beliefs and prejudices about blacks, slavery, and the prospect of the emancipation of American slaves. Abolitionist members of the group viewed slavery as a taboo, a sinful remnant of the prior generation. Others simply rejected the idea that freed slaves could live alongside white Americans, enjoying the same rights of citizenship. For them, deportation was the best solution. And some members saw in the emerging crisis of emancipation an opportunity to spread the word of God, or as one of the society’s founders put it: “We should send to Africa a population partially civilized and Christianized for its benefits; our blacks themselves would be in a better situation.”
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