The Dragons, the Giant, the Women

by Wayétu Moore

  “Sure, but who better to do those kinds of things?” he asked in that steadfast way.

  And there it was. His colossal being. His words pulling thunder from the sky.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” I said, my lips trembling in the silence. “For everything.”

  “I don’t know what I did but I will take it,” he laughed. “Here’s your mom.”

  Mam said hello almost immediately, taking the phone to commence small talk and news of her day.

  “How is …” she started to ask, finally.

  “We’re no longer seeing each other.” I rushed to tell Mam before she could finish.

  “Oh. Since when? He seemed nice,” she blurted, but in stutters.

  “He was. He was very nice. But …”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m well, I’m good,” I assured her. “This isn’t like the last one.”

  “Okay,” Mam said.

  “I think I want to go back to Liberia,” I blurted and waited to hear the slightest movement on the other end of the line.

  “Well, are you sure? Dry season is almost over.”

  “I think so. I started having that dream again. About Satta,” I said.

  “Oh. Did you think about …”

  “I did. And she was nice too. But I’m good. I want to do my own work,” I said, remembering the vanilla smell of the therapist’s office. Mam was silent for longer than I knew what to do with, so I sat on the sill and waited.

  “I think it’s time,” I said in the void.

  “Come then,” Mam had said finally, as if conceding a fight she had long hoped she would lose. “Come home.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I arrived at night. From the sky, Monrovia was a mass of blackness with the occasional pocket of light that looked no more significant than a colony of fireflies. Almost everyone in the plane sounded like Papa and Mam, and for that reason I felt safe. I thought I would experience fear or anxiousness, those friends who consumed much of my last memories in that city. But there was warmth, a victory in the landing, mild clapping in the cabin.

  As I exited the plane and descended the stairs onto the tarmac, the smells of fresh rubber sap, fried greens, and sweat competed for my senses. I examined the faces and postures of those waiting on the ground for hints of familiarity. Words, both shouted and spoken quietly, clashed into each other as the airport workers hustled to accommodate and also size up the passengers of their latest flight.

  I had been staring at a woman’s freshly painted red nails and the neat fit of her uniform when she caught me.

  “Welcome,” she said, smiling as she searched my face and eyes to see if I was of any importance.

  “Thank you,” I whispered and hurried into customs.

  I entered a small room with posters labeled “Liberian” and “Diplomat” and “Non-Citizens,” which looked to have all at one point been white but were since stained by neglect, and noticed that a thin man wearing a T-shirt too big for his frame held a torn piece of paper with my name on it.

  “Hi, Wayétu, welcome home,” he said as soon as I read the sign. “Your Pa sent me for you.”

  I nodded and smiled, immediately following him as he processed my passport and led me to an area where the entire flight stood shoulder to shoulder, anxious for their bags to teeter across the broken ribs of an outdated carousel.

  “How was your flight?” he asked, as though he knew me, content and committed to my comfort and happiness, as much as to delivering me to Papa and Mam without error.

  “It was fine,” I answered, as the carousel shifted, then reluctantly inched along.

  “Don’t worry,” the man said, “just point out the bags to me. Your Ma and Pa waiting outside.”

  He rushed to grab my bags as soon as I pointed to them, squeezing his way between the unmethodical assembly. We exited the crowded room and airport, and a sea of black faces waited anxiously outside. There were Ankara and country cloth shirts and dresses on some of their bodies, the kind that Mam used to wear, while others wore light T-shirts and shorts to cope with the dry season humidity and Harmattan winds. Immediately, I realized that I was an entity for consideration. I was wearing jeans and sandals with a white blouse, and I wore my weave in a ponytail that hung down my back. People looked at my face, at my clothes and bags, as if I were an alien, before tiring of it all and searching beyond where I stood for the family member or friend who had not yet emerged.

  The man led me past the initial group to the edge of the parking lot.

  I recognized them in the distance, peering ahead as if waiting for a right answer in a mass of incorrectness, the only one that mattered.

  They looked the same. Papa wore a polo shirt and fidgeted with his keys. He wore glasses now and they glared in the distance. Mam held her purse with both hands, her neck searching, her braids thin and neat.

  There is a weight that builds on shoulders when one leaves home. The longer a person stays away, the heavier the burden of displacement. I saw Papa and Mam standing there and the lost hours returned, came back to me in layers. There were familiar intonations that gathered across the parking lot, those vowel-heavy words like an ocean pushing against me, those faces and bodies like mine, like my friends’, and the burden lifted, died in that moment. Mam started toward me with her arms extended, crying, and I hurried to her, buried myself in the resurrecting cloud of her presence.

  “There she is,” Papa said and joined our embrace, his brooding body an extra sheet of nostalgia.

  “Sorry,” Mam said, crying over my shoulder, and I was not sure for what. My recent heartbreak? The long flight? We would talk longer, in private, she gestured this with a nod, and I took comfort in the fact that she had not changed. Papa paid the man sent in to help me, who by now had loaded the truck with my bags.

  “Thank you, chief,” he said, nodding, and scurried to another cluster of vehicles that had just arrived, hopeful for his next gig.

  Our drive home was pitch black except for Papa’s two beaming headlights on the dim road away from Robertsfield airport. I rolled down the window so those smells could awaken my memories—peanut soup, oil from dry fish, the rising smoke from charcoal pots. The night sky was so complete with constellations that I gasped. We navigated the dusty and bumpy roads in the darkness, and I saw clusters of palm trees, various congregations of pen-pen drivers, and moonlight markets of vendors selling coconut, corn, and other goods remaining from the day. I searched faces, scanned them as they filled the dirt junctures of those roads.

  That night, Mam made my favorite dish. She served me cassava leaves over rice with deep-fried fish and pepper sauce, and as soon as the warm greens rested on my tongue, I was ashamed for having attempted to make the dish myself.

  “You eat rice with a fork now?” Mam asked, as she and Papa filled their spoons.

  I laughed with her and glanced at the polished, naked spoon she had placed beside my plate. I took another bite.

  After dinner when Papa left the table, Mam held my hand to stay.

  “How are you doing with … are you still dreaming?” she asked and coughed after she said it, placing a napkin over her mouth, so gracefully that I committed the moment to memory to learn the way.

  “Better. It’s only once in a while. But they’re all similar now.”

  She leaned back in her chair, her posture perfect. She had already settled so well “back home” as they called it. So why did she let us call Texas home for so long, if she knew that hers was not the same?

  “And how are you doing?” she asked, eyes locked with mine, in the soft way Mam smiles at her children, that enigmatic language, when she knows exactly how we feel.

  “I’m well,” I answered and mimicked her smile. But she knew better.

  No matter how old and together I liked to think I was, sharing any space with my parents, and specifically Mam, who was the only person in my life who always seemed with me, and also always left me, exposed even the most subtle sensitivities.

>   “Tell me about Satta,” I said finally. “I want to hear about her.”

  “There is nothing much to hear, dear,” Mam said. “Her name was Satta Fahnbulleh and she was from a town called Weelor in Cape Mount. Satta fought for Charles Taylor, and she was maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s all?”

  Mam shrugged. “Yes. Unfortunately. What else was there to know? We were all desperate.”

  “And there was no way of contacting her? No way to write her?”

  “How?” Mam said, lines now spread across her forehead, as if I had already managed to overwhelm her, with just a few hours of time between us.

  “Everything will be okay, Tutu. You’re home now,” she said after a brief silence. She stood up from her chair and kissed my cheek as if I was five again, and I was afraid and I longed for my mother, and we had not seen each other in a long time.

  Before we reached the Vai Town bridge after SKD Boulevard, traffic had no king, and cars and trucks shared roads with pen-pens and keh-kehs—transport motorbikes and enclosed motorized tricycles—both of which Papa forbade me ever to ride.

  “They can’t drive. Those things are dangerous,” he said.

  “It’d be easier if the roads weren’t so awful.”

  “Seriously,” Mam agreed from the passenger seat.

  They had both taken a few days off from the university for my homecoming.

  “When will they fix them?” I asked, to which Papa huffed.

  “Who knows,” he answered, his hands steady on the wheel.

  “And they’ve been this way since the war?”

  “Most of them, yes. The rebels destroyed the infrastructure. Pulled out pipes and wires to go sell.”

  “Who ruins the thing they’re fighting for?” I shook my head, disenchanted.

  “Maybe Liberia is not what they were fighting for,” he said in a low tone, and the words lingered for moments after, haunting me.

  Those childhood images of princes marching into a vast and webbed forest—Kru princes and Mano princes and Congo princes. Indeed, Liberia was not the entire motive, the full story. And how could it be? In my classrooms in America, I cringed when we discussed African wars. I argued with a classmate once that America too had once had a civil war, on a day I struggled for words to defend African dignities and contest his claims that Africans were barbaric for always fighting.

  But Papa was right that most Liberians, most, did not choose Liberia to be their country. Just as Ivorians did not choose. Just as Ghanaians and so many others did not choose; some men in Berlin in 1884 drew those lines, gave those names. Without agency, who can love a country forced upon them? Those princes from my childhood were fighting not only for their people but also for their nations, the countries they chose. Gio is a country. Mano is a country. Kpelle is a country. Vai is a country. And these nations were centuries old. Men and women across the continent would die with those nationhoods on their hearts. Out of the window, each journeying face a labyrinth I paced for hints of our former life, I melted at every dead end.

  “Where did the rebels go?” I asked Papa, and watched as his hands squeezed the steering wheel.

  “Look outside the window. They’re all around here,” he said. “Some of these taxi drivers, gas station attendants, security guards. They’re everywhere.”

  “They just picked up and resumed their lives as if nothing happened,” Mam said.

  As Papa’s truck snailed along a road riddled with potholes, Monrovia seemed to be thriving, bursting with movement. Pen-pen drivers crowded junctions beside markets where coconut, fried plantain, and fresh produce vendors chatted as customers searched their inventory. A man wearing a faded Cleveland Browns T-shirt paced behind three rows of church shoes, neatly polished, as a few customers loitered nearby, taking second looks at the shiny stock while waiting for the next taxi. There were Chiclet and Kleenex sellers, and men waving fresh fish from rank, overflowing buckets by their tables. There were preachers and mechanics and schoolteachers and pimps. Fortune-tellers and accountants and hustlers and caterers for hire. Weave salesmen and saleswomen—“Attachment! Attachment!” they screeched. The packets of straight and wavy, sporadically highlighted Malaysian hair were just like the kinds I would find in Korean-run beauty supply stores on Nostrand and Flatbush Avenues.

  There were singing blind beggars, quotidian, and pop-up gas stations with merchandise sealed in glass mason jars and beer bottles, their prices handwritten neatly on cardboard beneath their stands. Bushmeat pushers dangling deer and other forest herbivores by their hind legs. Uniformed schoolgirls who held hands as they ran across the road, giggling, oblivious but self-aware, and it made me think of the Blackgirls in Texas, and wonder about the social order of Liberian lunchrooms.

  Cars teetered along and taxi drivers swore out of opened windows with their last breaths.

  “I don’t remember these markets,” I said.

  “They were not here in NormalDay. Not like this,” Papa said. “Not before the war, and certainly not before the coup. More and more people from all over the country moved to Monrovia for jobs after we left.”

  Cars honked around us, and every so often a black SUV raced ahead of the stagnant rows of cars. Some had portable flashing sirens on their hoods, some were followed or preceded by a few cars or pen-pens, and they created third or fourth lanes into oncoming traffic. The cars in the opposite lanes stopped or drove to the edge of the road, making room for the unvarying black vehicles and the men they carried.

  “Are those cops?” I asked Papa, and he laughed.

  “No. They’re mostly politicians.”

  “Do you know any?” I asked, making a mental note to peer through the windows for what these men looked like.

  “A few. But many of them didn’t live in Monrovia when we were coming up.”

  I envisioned the men in those cars who were once children upcountry in ignored villages—their families unable or uninspired to make the trip to Monrovia for lack of resources, of opportunity, of housing, of connections. Then after the 1980 coup, culminating with Liberia’s wars, these families, many disregarded by the monopoly of power that existed in the city walls before then, moved en masse to live within Monrovia’s borders, changing the face and shape of the city, reconstructing its body, an incurable metamorphosis. And these children grew up to buy the cars and the house staff and the girls, just like the men their fathers and grandfathers had once criticized. Tailored suits and bow ties. Security men and rubber farms. Gated homes and lawns too expansive for the children their wives let them claim as their own. I recalled the pictures I once saw of those first settlers in Monrovia from America, who wore top hats and three-piece suits during the dry season, on days that could not have been less than ninety degrees. But they had made it to a land, made it back home to the continent, free now with a country all their own. And they built the houses and the farms and the government, built the churches and the schools and the clinics, and they bought the clothes like the men their fathers and grandfathers had criticized. They say the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house. And alas, those at the soundless core of Liberia, then as well as now, tired of attempting to overthrow their rulers, use their master’s tools to build houses of their own. To build cities of their own. And how? How does one model a nonpareil freedom with the master’s tools, the same used to mold the institutions that kept them in chains? Pyrrhic victories.

  An eager crowd ran toward an already overflowing taxi. One woman managed to squeeze in and the taxi faded out to a dirt road between two corner market sellers. Papa finally turned from the main road.

  “Does this look familiar?” he asked when we arrived at a house with a tin roof and a full clothesline along the side of the structure. The green paint was chipped across the surface and half of the cement of the front porch was missing.

  “What is this?” I asked, squinting at the overgrown bushes in the front yard.

  “It’s Cald
well.”

  The house, now small and unfamiliar, stood ruined, like an estranged friend, a friend who’d wronged me and still was anxious for me to make the first move. Mam’s garden was gone, and the roof had been replaced with sheets of zinc. The once-paved roads of the neighborhood had been reduced to dirt and rocks—the road to the neighboring houses unrecognizable. Iguanas and lizards clambered over the outlying bushes and palm trees.

  “Wow,” I said, my voice cracking, and opened the car door.

  “No,” Papa said, almost shouting.

  “Why? I want to ask to go inside.”

  “No. That somebody else house now.”

  “Wait, what? They’re squatters. You own that house,” I said closing the door.

  A woman appeared on the porch wearing a lappa tied tightly to her waist, a child tied to her back.

  “Let them have it. There is nothing in there for me. Not anymore.”

  After the port, after the game of dodging potholes, careful not to scrape the edges, as if each were a wide-open gate to the bellies of hell, we reached Vai Town. And half a mile beyond the port, before a gas station, there is a road once paved, now hunched and imploded, with shacks born of war on either side. I grew eager to reach the end of that road. I could not wait to see her.

  “They won’t win!” a man shouted, pointing to a television, crowded at the feet by young boys avoiding schoolwork or selling water packs in traffic to add to their family incomes.

  “You a damn fool. You see they up like that you say they will not win? You think it easy thing, scoring in soccer?”

  And beyond the salt of those words there was more road, more children playing, unaware of how those plum trees bloomed in NormalDay. And beyond those children, at the end of that Logan Town road, there sat a house underneath a plum tree, and an old woman on the porch. Frail she was, her full head covered, her neck almost gliding with the wind to turn her face toward the various subjects, as if they were all a part of her kingdom, as if they orbited around that house.

  Before the car even stopped, I was undone with tears. I had been away for so long—in that new country—and how could I know she was waiting? Her wrinkles told time, told stories. Her corneas were rimmed with gray. I exited the car and she squinted, concerned.