by Wayétu Moore
SEVEN
They found little girls’ shoes in an abandoned house, mismatching slippers and sneakers and church shoes that Papa insisted we wear even though I cried that it was painful to walk with them on. We were only three days away from a town called Junde, where we would catch a canoe that would take us to the village Lai.
“It’s not safe to walk with no shoes on. The glass in the road will cut you,” Papa had said.
The outer layers of my feet were swollen and shredded from the sugarcane field thorns. Each step made my stomach turn and hurt, and that feeling traveled to my head. The sting was so serious that it felt like all of the water in my body left me from my eyes, and the river left a trail on the road out of Monrovia.
Since Papa was already holding K, who slept through the disorder in a small space underneath his chin, Brother James picked me up on his hip to ease my soreness.
The farther north we walked with our countrymen out of Monrovia, the more of us crowded the exploded pavement—shoeless and shirtless—faces smeared with all of the changes only three weeks had caused.
We walked underneath the sun. Brother James, whose once-shiny dress shoes had now dulled and lost their soles, limped as he held me; his steps were so inconsistent that on several occasions I nearly slid down his waist. The sun rays juked my eyes until I hid my face in Brother James’s neck. A bitter smell seeped from his skin as he walked; he panted as if my body grew heavier in his arms.
When I awoke, the sun was almost gone and our company had stopped walking. Brother James put me down and held my hand as I rubbed my eyes beside him. The road was nearly empty, except for a few other escapers before us, and down the road Papa walked away from us, to a confrontation between a lone rebel and a man he recognized. Ma took my hand away from Brother James and pulled me and my sisters close to her, unsure whether she should hide in the sugarcane fields or continue behind Papa.
“James,” she said.
“Wait here,” Brother James told her and followed Papa. “The boy look high.” The rebel, a boy around fourteen years old, no older than Torma, pointed a rifle at a man’s head. He laughed as he did, a sound like razors cutting bones. The man stood on the sidelines, facing the road, his face covered with tears, his shirt stained with blood.
The boy wore camouflage trousers and black boots that were too large for his feet; he had a smug smile and eyes so red they looked like they were bleeding.
“I don’t have money!” the man cried.
“Wait … wait,” Papa said, approaching them. His hands were raised in the air. “Don’t shoot!” he shouted. “Please don’t shoot,” Papa said again. From behind he looked different, smaller and as thin as the gun now pointed in his direction. “Here. Here, right here.” Papa raised a crumbled wad of money from his pocket.
“Don’t shoot,” he said. The boy stared at the old five-dollar bill in the air. Papa threw the money on the ground in front of the rebel. The boy scuttled to pick up the pale green wad. He turned around and ran through an adjacent field. When he was out of sight, Papa ran to the man and hugged him.
“Amos!” he said. Amos collapsed in Papa’s arms.
“Thank you. Thank you,” he said, wiping his face. “He made me stand there all day.”
“God bless you. Come,” Papa said, picking up Amos.
“We got to hurry before he come back,” Papa said, pulling us together. “He will come back.” He motioned to us to keep walking and led us for another mile to a small shack in the back of a home that had been burned down. A family’s memories were scattered in the mud. Inside, Papa and Brother James pushed a few yard tools to the back of the room, clearing space on the floor for us to sit. The cement was covered with ashes from the fire, along with coal, likely used to light a smoke pot that was nowhere to be found.
“It looks like they took everything here,” Brother James said. He took an old towel from his bag and used it to push an empty frame and broken glass out of the shack. Amos still looked afraid and Brother James took a nearly empty bottle out of his bag of belongings to offer him. Amos drank the last of the bottle. I heard my Ol’ Ma gulp, squeezing my shoulder. I knew she had hoped to share some with us that night.
Outside the shack it began to rain again, and I imagined in the recent past a family that lived in the incinerated home, only a dozen yards from where we sat. I saw their living room and den, their hallways and kitchen, and a bedroom where children played. I wondered where they were in that moment, if they were also resting on the cool and damp cement of a stranger’s back house. Had they made it to Ghana? To Guinea? To Sierra Leone? Had they abandoned us here like the birds did? Like the planes did? Were they in America with Mam? I leaned into Ol’ Ma and daydreamed to ease my hunger, the dryness that painted my throat, making it as hard to swallow as it now was to cry.
“I owe you, Gus,” Amos said, finally catching his breath. Beneath his words, there were traces of his handsome, boyish face. “I will pay you back somehow.”
“Nonsense,” Papa said, sitting between Amos and Brother James across from us.
“I owe you, I owe you,” Amos repeated.
Papa put his hand around Amos’s shoulder. I wanted to go to him and hug him, but Ol’ Ma held on to me, not letting me break free from her.
“You will be safe now,” Papa said. “We will reach Junde day after tomorrow and we are taking a canoe to Lai to hide in Ma’s village. At least until they stop fighting.”
“How long have you been walking?” Amos asked.
“Three weeks. Almost.”
“Aye! The girls them too,” he shouted.
“Yeh, them too,” Papa said.
Amos looked at the sores on our mouths, numb to me now, that had appeared within our first week from the sugarcane we ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“Sugarcane,” Ma said, noticing his focus.
Amos shook his head.
“And you have not heard from Mam?” he asked.
“How?”
“I am not staying here,” Amos said. “I am trying to get out.”
“Borders closed,” Brother James said.
“They are letting some people pass. Some. They didn’t let me pass to Sierra Leone but I am going back toward Ghana to see if I can get across.”
“Dangerous business,” Papa said. “What news have you heard?”
“Doe is refusing to step down. Taylor and Prince Johnson got the rebels killing Krahn people and government people to force him to step down,” he said.
There was salt in the following silence.
“Come with us to Lai, Amos,” Papa said.
“You safer traveling with family, Amos. Government soldiers will mistake you for rebel, and rebels will try force you to join them or they will kill you,” Brother James said.
Papa and Brother James and Amos, they talked all night about Liberia and her problems and all the things that could change her back to her old self. They talked about 1980 and 1983 and 1989. These men and their voices. And the memory of that rebel’s voice—that stupid, insane boy, who, if he lived, would become a more stupid, more insane man. Men were talking plenty during this war. Men were deciding where to go and when to go and when to stop. They were deciding where to hide and what to eat and when to eat. They were deciding who would be killed and who would live. They were deciding which direction the planes would fly and when they would be removed from the sky. And they were dividing plates of not-enough food and leading the way. And those male dogs howling in the distance, bellies full of rotting male carcasses, as some rebel men decided who would cut their throats and roast them for that night’s meal. And those men at the edge of the forest, those princes and rebels who wished to kill Hawa Undu. Why all this palaver over a hiding dragon? Why hadn’t they just asked a woman, one like Mam, one of those women who could do anything, and go anywhere, to just go inside the forest and talk to Hawa Undu in a nice voice? To make him a feast and pepper his palm butter with those spices Mam used and feed him pork feet an
d dry fish like a king? And she would not fight him. She would just hold Hawa Undu’s hand and lead him outside.
EIGHT
There was nowhere on our cream-colored walls in Caldwell too high for Papa to reach, no piece of furniture that he could not move with the slightest push. I would press my hand against his and it barely fit in his palm. Amazed, I looked past the dark veins of his stretched fingers and laughed with him as we guessed how many of my tiny hands could fit into his. Four was the decision. Once at our house in Caldwell, he told Wi, K, and me to stand together and hold each other as tightly as we could. Not knowing what to expect from the request, I hugged both of my sisters from either side. I grabbed their waists as they too grabbed mine. We huddled together and giggled over each other’s shoulders, looking around nervously for him. From the hallway—he took measured strides in our direction with hunched shoulders and muscular limbs that dangled from each side.
“Rooooar,” he said, making his way toward us.
We squealed and held on to each other as the giant approached.
“Rooooooooar,” he said again, this time picking up his angled feet and running to where we stood.
He picked us up all at once. He twirled us around until our stomachs hurt from laughter. I held on to the girls as our heads bobbled high in the air. I saw the face of Moneysweet through the window, smiling. Korkor warned that he should not make us so dizzy that we would be sick for dinner. He continued, nonetheless, and we did not stop laughing until the fufu dropped into the stew of our stomachs at dinner that night.
Before Mam left for America, I saw him play the game with her one night. He captured her while she was in the kitchen cutting greens and threw her over his shoulder. Mam held her dress down as he balanced her over his shoulder. She screamed just as loudly as we did as he spun her around in midair and her hair draped toward the floor.
“P-put me down!” she chuckled, thrown over his shoulder.
Papa ran with her throughout the house, through the rooms and parlors, ran until he reached the den couch where he stopped and gently laid her down. She caught her breath from the hoots and giggles and pushed her hair back from over her face. The muscles in her neck tightened as she was getting ready to scold him, but Papa kissed her before she could speak, his shoulders dropped.
An aunty told a story once and let me listen. That Papa was not always as tall as he was during the years before the war. Was not always a big big man. Papa’s Ma could not afford to keep him in her care. When he was a young child, his Ma took him to Virginia, Liberia, to live with his father and his father’s wife. At seven years old he was a shy boy, and he stuttered, and his only friends were his half brother and half sister. In Virginia, Papa’s family was part of the Congo middle class who owned stores and rubber farms, living better than those upcountry, but still not as well as the Congo people in Monrovia.
“Gus,” his stepmother called toward the small room where he slept. They said that Papa was led to the living room, where his father held two dogs. One was a white poodle that his sister ran to. The other was a black Labrador.
“Go.” His father commanded the Labrador to go to Papa, who stood bravely still, although they say he was at first afraid. The dog went to Papa, first sniffing his feet and the ground around him, then working his nose up Papa’s leg to the mangled shorts that hung from his slim waist. Certain that the only way to get over shaking in the dog’s presence would be to hug him as his sister was doing, Papa extended his stiff hand into the air, ready for what was to come.
“What will you name them?” his stepmother had asked.
“Sugarlum,” Papa’s father said of the poodle.
“Sugarlum! Sugarlum!” Papa’s sister blubbered happily and jumped around with the dog until it began to bark up at her and its tongue hung from the side of its mouth.
“And the other one?” his stepmother had asked, then looking at Papa and the black dog that now sat loyally by his side.
“Nobody,” his father said without delay.
“What?”
“Nobody. The dog named Nobody,” he chuckled to himself.
“Nobody?” his stepmother joined him laughing.
“Okay then, Nobody, take your dog and go get sugar for me from the neighbor,” his stepmother joked playfully. The dog followed him. He smelled the road in front of Papa as he walked, with the front half of his body leading the way. The houses of Virginia were brick buildings that sat on several acres each, lining a paved road with residents carefully driven around by newly trained drivers, people from upcountry who recently moved into the cities for work.
When he reached the yard of the neighbor’s house, he stopped and looked down at the black dog.
“Stay here,” he said quietly. He turned from the dog but shortly after heard Nobody’s heavy pants behind him. Papa stopped walking and held out his hand.
“Stay here,” he said again, this time slightly louder than before. Nobody sat down in the grass. Again, Papa turned from the dog and headed toward the front door of the house. Also, again, Nobody followed him. Finally, Papa threw the stick in his hand. Nobody’s head twisted toward the stick as it flew in the air and landed on the road behind him. He watched Papa approach the door and, instead of retrieving the stick, darted behind him.
“Hello, boy,” the neighbor said blandly as she opened the door.
“H-hello,” Papa stuttered. He paused a moment and tried to concentrate so the simple request would not take him a long time to say. “H-hello,” he stuttered again. “M-m-my Ma want know if she can borrow sugar.” He wiped his forehead when he was finished.
“What is that?” the neighbor asked, repelled by the black dog that stood behind Papa, who turned around and shook his head at the dog.
“Go!” he said. “Go from here!” he pointed to the road where the stick lay. Nobody sat still.
“That’s your dog?” the neighbor asked, inspecting the Labrador.
“Yeh. My Pa bring it home today,” Papa said.
“Hm. What’s his name?” she asked.
“N-Nobody.”
“Nobody? Nobody is the dog’s name?” she asked and shortly after burst out with laughter. “Well, that’s something,” she said finally after catching her breath and hissed her teeth. “Wait here,” she said and disappeared from the front door into the house. She returned with a small jar of white sugar cubes and handed it to Papa.
“Thank you,” he told her and left her front porch, where she stood and watched him until he left.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay there?” Papa said out loud. Nobody followed him, and continued to sniff the road as he had done on the way to the neighbor’s house. A car drove past them and honked as Nobody drifted to the middle of the street.
“Stay here!” Papa yelled to the dog, as it ran quickly back to his side from the flying rocks that sped through the tires of the speeding car.
Nobody stopped in the road as Papa continued to walk. At first he did not care and continued to walk along with the glass of sugar cubes back to his house. Then he turned around to find that the dog was still behind him sniffing the grass. From the house at the end of a bougainvillea garden, two boys approached. Before Papa could speak, the boys were taking turns throwing stones at Nobody and Papa ran toward them.
“Leave my dog!” Papa had said.
“And what you will do? Go back to the village and tell your country Ma?” one said and threw another stone.
“My Ma’s not country,” Papa said.
“Where is she then? That’s not your Ma at your Pa’s house. Why nobody seen your real Ma?”
And Papa could not answer. Even he did not remember her, only her promise that she would one day return for him after leaving him with his father.
“You country boy, say you country boy. Your Pa Congo, that don’t mean you’re not a heathen.”
And this was my favorite part of the story. One of the stones the boy had thrown landed on Nobody’s neck and he yelped. And Papa, when he saw thi
s, grew ten feet tall, right where he stood. Nobody hid behind Papa, and he picked up those stones that had fallen and began to throw them back. One of them even flew into the window on the boys’ house. And he knew he would get a beating that night because of it, but he did not care. He threw and threw, and he was so strong that the stone went into another window. And he was so strong, so tall, that he picked those bullies up, one at a time, and he threw them across the yard. And he was so strong that one of the stones he threw, the heaviest one, landed on one bully’s shirt and pinned him to the ground. It took days and three whole men to push it out of the way and free the bully. And from that day on, they never touched him or Nobody again. They stopped calling him names, stopped making fun of him for being only half of his father, and they barely even looked his way when they returned to school.
While we traveled through the checkpoints to Junde, I remembered, though he looked quite different and skinnier now than he was in Caldwell, that Papa had the incredible power to transform into a giant who could protect us and carry us away.
The third-to-last checkpoint was set up in the middle of a road beside an abandoned store. There were tables outside the store where guns lolled on top of one another. One soldier sat next to the table with guns while he cleaned the one in his hand with a torn and dirty camouflage cloth. Across from the building, there was a tank that some of the dragon’s men leaned against and sat on. The remaining soldiers crowded the road and questioned each group and individual traveler about who they were, what tribe they were from, where they were going, what they did for a living, if they knew anything about the war, or if they were on the side of the prince of the rebels. When the soldiers stopped us to ask questions, I saw the fear lift from Papa’s eyes as he transformed into the giant that I knew and loved.