The Darling (36 page)

Except by the dreamers. When I was no longer there mornings and afternoons with armloads of food and plenty of fresh water and kindly murmurings and filial touches on the hand and arm, they would know I had left them. And they would miss my pale shadow on the far side of the bars greeting their dark shadows, my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves, revealing to me and to them the face of our ancient, common ancestral mother, caught and given shape here and now in her descendants’ mirrored gaze. The dreamers and I took each other out of the specificity of personal time and physiognomy. When in their presence I was in sacred time and space, and they were, too. I was convinced of it.

I know how this probably sounds to you, but I don’t care. Any more than a born-again Christian cares what she sounds like when she tells an atheist of her personal relationship with an itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. There are parallels between my meetings with the chimpanzees and the Christian’s encounter with Christ. When I first saw the dreamers, like a Christian touched by her savior, I wept uncontrollably. Later, through the daily rituals associated with caring for them, like any steadfast acolyte, I gradually got myself close enough to see them for what they truly were, a gate that led me straight to that ancestral mother. The spirit of the river, the one they call Mammi Watta.

I tell you this even though I know you might think it little more than spiritual bilge, a weird form of New-Age hogwash, because I’ve come to trust your kind patience and open-mindedness. I’m not a conventionally religious woman. I’m not religious at all. But until the dreamers entered my life, I was locked into a material world whose only exit lay in an imagined future, a utopian fantasy. Until I met the dreamers, I was stuck with a mere
ideology
of exit.

Slowly I walked from cage to cage, as if passing along the stations of the cross, with my head slightly bowed, my teeth carefully covered, hands loose at my sides, and the dreamers quieted one by one and silently watched me, babies and adults alike. I said to them in a low murmur,
I’m leaving you today and do not know when I will return. And I pray that this is a riskier, more worrisome thing for me than it will be for you. And I pray that in my absence neither of us will fall back to being what we were before. That we not become imprisoned isolates. That we not become monads. That we not become as we were, motherless brothers and sisters unable to recognize one another as kin
. I passed along the cages, and when I returned to my starting point, repeated my slow walk and said the prayer again, and did it a third time, making of it a ritual act. And then I bowed my head and backed slowly out of the building into the glare of sunlight and closed and locked the heavy door behind me.

Chapter III

T
HE SIGHT OF SO MANY
white people rushing to get through passport control and customs at JFK nearly sent me running back to the plane. I had not seen a majority of white people gathered together in one place in nearly ten years. There were some blacks in the crowd, of course, men wearing safari jackets, guayabera shirts, or dashikis, women in long, colorful wraps—my fellow travelers from Africa. Another cluster of weary, well-dressed families whose very foreignness made them look comfortably familiar to me had come off a flight from Delhi. Most of the white people, me included, wore jeans and sneakers and tee shirts, summer travel apparel for European tourists in the States and Americans returning from abroad. Many of them, as did I, wore small, papoose-sized backpacks. They were my people, members of my tribe.

But the whites didn’t look quite human to me. Their faces were all the shades of an English rose garden, from chalk to lemon yellow to pink to scarlet, and their noses and ears were too large for their heads, their hair was lank and hung slackly down and, where it wasn’t held in place by a cap or hat, seemed about to slip off their skulls and fall to the floor. They looked dangerous, so self-assured and knowing, so intent and entitled, as they rushed to stand in neat rows and handed their passports to the uniformed officers waiting in booths like bored ticket takers at an amusement park.

When my turn came, before presenting my passport, I opened and glanced into it, half expecting to see there a photograph of a black woman—someone who did not resemble these white people—and surprised myself with the face of a woman named Dawn Carrington, who did indeed resemble the white people. The officer, a gaunt man in his forties with strands of thinning black hair combed sideways over the top, took the passport and examined the photograph carefully and matched it with my face. He breathed through his mouth as if suffering from a cold. He flipped the blank pages, then paused over the page that had been stamped years earlier, first in Accra and when I came over to Liberia. He cleared a clot of phlegm from his throat and said, “You’ve been away for quite some time.”

“Yes. I was married there,” I said. “To an African.”

“And your husband? Is your husband traveling with you, Mrs…?” he looked again at my photo. “Carrington.”

“No.”

“I see.” He hovered over the information for a second, then pursed his lips as if about to whistle. “So you reside in Liberia, then?”

“Yes. I have… I have children born there.”

“I see. How many?”

“Three. Three sons.”

“I see.” Another long pause. He gazed over the heads of the swelling crowd and into the distance. “How long will you be away from your husband and children, then?”

“I’m not sure. Not long. I’m here to visit my parents,” I quickly added, surprised to hear it said like that, so frankly and easily. Surprised to find myself telling him the truth.

“I see.” He handed the passport back and stared at me for a second, as if he knew me from a distant past, and I returned his stare, as if he did not. He twitched his narrow, red nose, wrapped it in a hanky and blew. “Well, welcome home, Missus Carrington,” he said and blew again.

BY THE TIME
I got out of the terminal, it was mid-morning, and the air was already hot and humid and gritty with soot—New York City in late July. I rode into Manhattan in a taxi driven by a very large, middle-aged black man whose shaved head glistened with sweat, and I started to feel safe again: I’d made it through passport control and customs and had gotten away from the white people. From the name posted on the divider, Claude Dorsinville, I guessed that the cab driver was Haitian. Yes, he said, from Port-au-Prince, but he had lived in Brooklyn for fifteen years. His children were Americans. I asked him if he wanted to return to Haiti someday. “Yes, yes!” he said. “But not till America go down there an’ bomb the hell out of my country and get rid of the Duvaliers. Just like they did in Grenada,” he added.

A half-hour later, when I walked into the cavernous space of the main concourse at Penn Station, I looked around and found myself surrounded once more by white Americans—prosperous, well-fed, loud, and purposeful men, women, and children, with only a sprinkling here and there of black people. Suddenly, I was sure I was being followed. I glanced behind me and scrutinized the faces of the commuting businessmen and -women, the Eastern seaboard travelers, the college students, even the children standing in line with me for tickets.
Who among you knows who I really am and is waiting for me to give myself up? Who among you will reveal me to the others?
An ageless woman wrapped in a tattered tan overcoat and wearing gloves and a knit cap scuffled unnecessarily close and seemed to study my face for a second too long. Was she a panhandler? Why didn’t she ask me for money? I tried to appear distracted by deep thoughts. Just another traveler, an ordinary citizen heading wearily home. I tried to look like what I was—an American, upper-middle-class, white lady in her natural habitat. But it was as if I were back traveling underground, incognito and in danger of being suddenly recognized and denounced by a stranger, exposed, my artful disguise ripped away, the bomb hidden in my duffel carefully removed and defused, my backpack emptied and false IDs laid out on a steel table in an interrogation room, while I am forced to look down at them and answer the question
Which of these women is you?

On the train, I managed to find a seat alone at the rear of the last car, where I could watch the other passengers without being easily watched back. By New Haven, I had calmed sufficiently to realize that maybe I wasn’t so much paranoid as merely exhausted, jet-lagged, and hungry. Cautiously I made my way forward to the café car, bought a plastic-wrapped tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee, returned with them to my seat, and later slept and did not wake until the train pulled into Boston’s South Station. End of the line.

Whenever I’d been asked, whether by the officer at JFK or at home by Woodrow or the boys or by Sam Clement or anyone else, whom in America I planned to visit, I had said the obvious and expected thing:
Why, I’m going to visit my parents, my mother and father, in Emerson, Massachusetts
. In a vague and general way, though it was the truth, it was not so much a travel plan as merely a way of postponing the choice of a destination. Until the moment that I actually arrived in Boston and walked out of South Station into the rusty, fading, early-evening light and crossed to the line of taxis waiting at the curb and realized that, once in the cab, I would have to tell the driver to take me to a house in the suburbs, 24 Maple Street in Emerson,
Don’t worry, I know the way and will give you directions
, until that moment, I had not been committed to a specific travel plan. I’d had no itinerary.

There were alternatives, of course. Thanks to the generosity, if you want to call it that, of Samuel Doe, I had enough cash in my backpack to go anywhere in America. Although I hadn’t communicated with them in years, I knew that without too much trouble I could make quick contact with old friends and associates from the Movement, people who would welcome me back into the fold from the cold, who would let me sleep on a couch or cot until I found a place of my own, who would provide me with a new name, social security number, and driver’s license, and would pass me from safe house to safe house, from friend to acquaintance to complete stranger, until I ended up separated from myself by seven or eight degrees, living in some small town in eastern Oregon, working as a school nurse and sharing a double-wide trailer with a divorced lineman who thought I was who I said I was.

It was 1983, the war against the war was long over, Ronald Reagan was president, and young Americans were more interested in getting rich by the time they turned thirty than in refusing to trust anyone who’d already turned it. It was, in a sense, the perfect time for me to have returned, the perfect time to show my back to all that I had thought and believed and dreamed and done and failed to do, and start over. I could become a social worker in Albany, a caterer in East Lansing, Michigan, an ambulance driver in St. Louis. Or I could go back to New Bedford, where Carol was probably still living with her daughter, Bettina, and waiting tables at the same seafood restaurant, maybe still renting the same third-floor walkup apartment, and if in the meantime she hadn’t hooked up with one of those wiry, ponytailed men with tattoos crawling over their chests and arms whom she seemed irresistibly drawn to, she would let me have my old room back. Or I could simply strike out on my own, wade into America’s vastness and anonymity, bobbing up someplace I’d never been before, with a new life story already forming, one bit of false information sticking to another, like the beginnings of a coral reef that someday will seem to have been there all along, as substantial and self-evidently true as the continent itself.

That’s the real American Dream, don’t you think? That you can start over, shape-change, disappear and later reappear as someone else. That you can survive the deliberate murder of your personal past and even attend your own funeral, if you want, and watch the mourners from the shade of a grove of trees a short way off, be the stranger at the edge of the crowd, her presence barely noticed or remarked upon.
I don’t know who she is, a friend of someone in the family, I guess
. And when everybody has finally left the cemetery, and you’re alone there, you come forward and pluck a flower from one of the baskets left at the graveside, put it in your hair, if you want and, like a happy ghost, walk off with the secret knowledge that down in the darkness under the dirt the coffin is empty, there’s only sawdust inside it or rocks or a dummy stuffed with straw.

I pushed my duffel ahead of me into the back seat of a taxi and got in. The driver, a flat-faced Boston Irishman wearing a Red Sox cap, half turned to me. “Hiya, how ya doin’?” he said. “Where ya wanna go?”

BY THE TIME
the cab stopped in front of number 24 on gracefully curved, tree-lined Maple Street, it was almost dark. Lawn sprinklers carved silver arcs above the mint-green lawns. Wide, sloping paved driveways led to two- and three-car garages, breezeways, and screened side porches. The thick-leaved trees along the street were maples, of course, forty and fifty years old. The neighborhood was long established, a planned community from the early 1920s of large, neocolonial homes planted on nineteenth-century farmland and lately painted in neocolonial colors with names like baguette, flannel, and persimmon, with coiffed hedges and manicured yards the size of boarding-school playing fields. They were comfortable, oversize houses that had been designed to shelter well-educated, calm, orderly families with inherited money for up to three generations before being sold off to strangers with new money. My parents’ house—a three-bedroom Cape Cod with dormers and an attached el for my father’s study and home office—was slightly more modest than the others. They’d paid cash for it with a gift provided by Daddy’s father shortly after I was born, only a few years into their marriage and Daddy’s medical career. Except for dorm rooms at Rosemary Hall and Brandeis, until I was in my mid-twenties, it was the only home I had known.