The Darling (15 page)

Courting. And now here I was myself dealing with a man in the same way, meeting him for lunch and dinner three and four times a week, talking on the telephone almost daily, giving and receiving little gifts, meeting his friends, and soon, soon, he promised, his family, but plenty of time yet for that. I was dealing with Woodrow Sundiata in a way that I knew could only be called courting.

And we weren’t fucking. We were barely kissing. We held hands when walking along the moonlit beach, but rarely in public, and were held in each other’s arms when dancing at the Mamba Point Hotel or at the several government and Masonic balls that Woodrow invited me to. Mostly, though, we talked, talked to one another, talked in the way that is specific to courtship, speaking at first, as all lovers do, through a mask to a mask—long hours of talk that over time, weeks, months, slowly, atom by atom, transformed the mask of the other into an actual face and made one’s own mask as invisible to the wearer as to the viewer. It was how one lost track of the masks and how one came to know oneself anew. I thought: So this is what it’s like, being in love! I get it. You become a new person! A person unknown.

I told him the story of my life, most of it, a version of it, and he told me his, and in the telling both storytellers came to believe that their stories were true.
I’m the person I’m describing
, I thought,
I really am!
I knew that I was editing the story as I told it, but not to hide anything or to protect myself—I believed that I wanted Woodrow to know everything about me, no lies and no secrets that mattered. But I was telling my story to a man, not another woman, and therefore edited it accordingly. And I was revealing what I knew of myself to a black African, not a white American, to a Christian, not an atheist, to a conservative government official, a member of the True Whig party, and not to a neo-Marxist fugitive under indictment by her own government for acts of civil disobedience and suspicion of terrorism. I had no choice but to alter, delete, revise, and invent whole chapters of my story. Just as, for the same reasons, I am doing here, telling it to you.

And Woodrow was doing it, too, I was sure. He was the person he was describing—at least I believed he was, even though he, too, must have been editing his story in hundreds of large and small ways to protect me from my abysmal ignorance of lives like his and to assuage my fears of the vast differences between us. He was doing for me what I was doing for him and now for you. As my mother and father had surely done for each other long ago during those months when they were courting, before they were married, so that when finally they did agree to marry and started fucking, each knew whom she or he was fucking and was confident that the other person did too.

Which is almost how it happened for me and Woodrow. I remember a night in May: Woodrow and I were returning from a policeman’s ball at the huge, yellow-brick Masonic temple at the center of the city. There had been a considerable amount of drinking and hearty male laughter at our table, which was not the head table, of course, where President Tolbert and his half-dozen closest ministers and their large, tulip-shaped wives had sat, but close enough to it for me to gain a considerable amount of favorable attention from the important men. That night, Woodrow proposed marriage to me.

Not exactly proposed marriage, but I knew it’s what he meant, and I didn’t exactly accept, but he knew what I meant, too. We were in the back seat of the Mercedes, with Satterthwaite driving, as usual, watching us in the rear-view mirror, as always. Woodrow was uncharacteristically voluble. He was happy and a little drunk. All evening long, from the tone and tune of the greetings he’d exchanged with the big men—from President Tolbert himself to the American ambassador to the chief of police—and from the way the big men had so politely flirted with me, it was becoming clear that Woodrow was about to enter the next inner circle of power, where at the center the president stood alone. And far from hindering his progress towards that center, the young, white American woman—whose past was known among the Americo-Liberian community to have been “adventurous” and possibly even a little politically dangerous, especially for a woman, the woman named Hannah Musgrave, whose passport still had her name as Dawn Carrington—that woman was in fact an obvious help to him. In that circle I glamorized the otherwise dull and officious little assistant minister of public health, for I knew that’s how they viewed him, as one of the cadre of boring, competent, American-educated bureaucrats whom the president used to keep the government running and the Americans happy. Woodrow was one of a contingent of Liberians whose business would have been business had they been of Lebanese or Indian descent or Mandingo, but because they were black Africans of at least partial African-American descent, their business was government.

Satterthwaite pulled the car over at the gate to my compound and shut off the headlights, but kept the motor running. He stepped from the car and walked slowly around to my door, as he always did when Woodow returned me to my residence, and waited for his boss to say his goodnights, spread my shawl gently over my shoulders, and reach across me and open the door.

Woodrow, however, placed his left hand onto my knee. “Hannah,” he said in a descending voice, as if about to deliver unexceptional bad news. “It’s time that I introduced you to my mother and father and my grandmothers. My people.” He cleared his throat and continued. “We have reached a very important point in our relationship, you and I.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Good! I’m eager to meet them.” And I was. It had been nearly four months by then that we had been courting, and from the beginning Woodrow had spoken of his family members with a respect that bordered on awe, as if they, too, like the president and his cronies, made up an inner circle of power and prestige that he very much wished to enter.

“Also my father’s other wives,” he said. “And his brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands, and my brothers and sisters, too, and their wives and husbands and children.”

I laughed abruptly, involuntarily, but he went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “It’s the time that we go to visit my people,” he said, placing heavy emphasis on
people
. I knew that his father was a farmer, an elder in the Kpelle tribe, and that the household was located in a tribal village in Bong County, about seventy miles inland from Monrovia. The family was Christian, Woodrow had told me in a reassuring way, although like most Liberians, especially country people, they practiced what he called “the old religion” as well.

I viewed myself as a firm atheist, so didn’t mind that at all. I reasoned that, since one superstition was pretty much like another, two or more practiced together were weaker than one alone. I was more threatened by a Baptist who believed only in the resurrection of Christ than I was by a Baptist who believed in both the resurrection of Christ and astrology. Thus I was more concerned about Woodrow’s own strict Christianity than about his Christian family’s reliance on “the old religion.” After joining the government, he himself had become a deacon in the United Methodist Church in Monrovia. He attended services every Sunday, and on several occasions had invited me to join him, until finally I was honest with him. “I’d feel like a hypocrite,” I said.

Woodrow seemed pleased. “Spoken, Hannah darling, like a true Christian.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Well, you view hypocrisy as a sin, a thing to be avoided at all costs.”

“Nearly all costs.”

“Yes, yes, nearly. Quite right. Don’t worry, my dear, the Lord has His ways and plenty of time. But never mind,” he said and smiled benevolently down upon me, as if having uttered a silent prayer for my conversion.

“I’m not worried,” I said. But I was.
Look at me
, I thought.
I’m in love with a
Christian,
a black African man who believes more in the god of my parents than in the gods of his
. How had this happened? I was in the midst of its happening, but still I had to ask. I was intelligent enough and sufficiently self-aware, even back then, to have tried viewing it as merely a reaction to my isolation and loneliness. During those first months in Liberia, I was utterly alone at the so-called plasma lab, except for the chimps and their caretaker, a man who fed them twice a day and who once a week made a half-hearted attempt to clean their cages, and the woman who took the blood samples from them. Everyone else I knew in this country, even the Americans posted at the embassy, I knew only through Woodrow. These people, all the foreigners, in fact, I deliberately avoided anyhow, regardless of Woodrow’s assurances that I was safe in Liberia under his protection, and that I
never
, he emphasized, would be extradited to the United States.

And you can be sure that I’d questioned the racial aspect of my love for Woodrow. I had dealt with that in the Movement long ago, after I’d gone through a rather lengthy period, eighteen months or so, of wanting to sleep only with black men. And did, with way too many of them, until finally, one night in Cleveland after a long, grueling, self-critical session with my Weather cohort, I saw myself as a racist commodifier of sex, acting out the age-old exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer. At least that’s what I confessed to. It wasn’t long afterwards that I began my first love affair with a woman, a white social worker named June.

But all that had faded, blown away like wisps of clouds after a storm. Now I can’t even remember June’s last name. Irish, I recall that much. June was Irish and had gone to Antioch. Of the too many black men I slept with, with the exception of the two or three I’d worked with in the Movement, I remember not even their first names. Calvin? Daryl? Walker? Why even call up the names of those poor men? It was long ago. And wrong.

So what was it about Woodrow Sundiata that brought me to believe that I had fallen in love with him and that made me, after a few short months, decide to marry him? My initial attraction had been mostly sexual, and within weeks, once I got used to his rigid, nearly expressionless face and constricted manners, had weakened somewhat. I no longer saw him as an African samurai. What, exactly, then, did I see in him, other than a benefactor and protector? If it wasn’t the color of his skin, perhaps it was the fact that he was African. That he was pointedly not American. In those years, I was bone weary of my war against everything American. The war against American racism, the war against the Vietnam War, the war against the System—all of it. It felt like I’d been at war my entire life, even as a child and adolescent waging the war against my parents. I hadn’t realized it until after I’d left Ghana and Zack, my last links to the Movement, but by the time I arrived in Monrovia, I was in a sense shell shocked.

Here in Liberia with Woodrow, it was peacetime for Hannah, almost as if all those old wars had been won, instead of lost or merely abandoned. Never in my life had I felt as free of anger as I felt then. That old, constant, edgy watchfulness, an irritated grasping after righteousness that I could never really trust anyhow—I felt none of it there. This was
Africa
, and the people who surrounded me and the man who was courting me were
Africans
. American racism, the Vietnam War, even the Cold War and the System that fed off it, and my parents—they mean nothing to the Africans, I thought then. And, presumably, could mean nothing to me, too.

Later, of course, I would think differently, but for the time being, floating between two identities, the one called Dawn Carrington, and the other Hannah Musgrave, I was at peace. A woman with two names I was nameless, with so many pasts I had no past. Leaving Ghana and Zack behind, I’d come to Liberia and had stumbled into bliss. It was in a state of surprised blissfulness, then, that I had met Woodrow Sundiata, and now I was about to meet his people and, if they approved, to marry him. Which, I knew, would take me even farther away from my wars, my parents, my pasts, than I had managed so far.

“When shall I meet them?”

“Saturday. I’ve sent word ahead, so they can prepare for your visit. This will be a significant day for them. In my family I am the only one who has not yet married. You’ve not yet been to the back country, have you?”

“No, I guess not. How … what shall I wear?” I felt foolish asking, but I knew that in an important sense this was a ceremonial occasion. I kept thinking of my mother’s first meeting with her future in-laws, the anxious silence in the parlor as the people who would become my father and grandparents read their respective Bibles, and the girl from Smith College sat alone on the sofa and looked from one Musgrave to the other, wondering who these people were, that such weird behavior could seem natural. And when they had finally been called to the dining room by the maid in her starched black uniform with the white collar and everyone was seated, Mother Musgrave said to her son, “Bernard, will you say grace?”

The college girl watched the others, and when they lowered their heads and closed their eyes, she did the same and for the first time heard her fiancé pray aloud to God and His resurrected Son. When he had finished,
In Jesus’ name, amen
, she opened her eyes and saw the cold, clotted vichyssoise suppurating in the dish before her. Oh, dear, she must have thought. What have I gotten myself into?

No one spoke. Silver clanked. The father slurped. The maid arrived with bread and soundlessly paddled back across the thick carpet to the kitchen. Finally, the son, the Yale medical student, cleared his throat, placed his soup spoon carefully down, and said, “Mother? Father? I have an announcement to make.”

The others looked up and placed their soup spoons as carefully down as he. The college girl did as they and put her hands in her lap. The mother dabbed at the corners of her thin, lipless mouth with her napkin. The girl did the same. The father turned in his chair to face his son, as if interviewing him for a position at the bank.

“Announce away!” Father Musgrave ordered.

The son, a tall, too-thin boy of twenty-four with permanently tousled brown hair and a large Adam’s apple, cleared his throat again and said, “Well, I’ve asked a girl to become my wife.” He looked across the table at the girl who would become my mother and smiled nervously, and the girl smiled back in a way that she hoped was reassuring and proud. “And I’m happy to say that she’s accepted!” he declared and laughed awkwardly. “How about that?”