by Wayétu Moore
“Ol’ Ma,” I said and stumbled up the porch steps. She still glared sternly at me, a stranger yet her kin.
“Ol’ Ma,” I said again. I touched her hands, my neck a canvas of tears, and they were still warm, still soft.
She looked at Mam, confused, then at me. After she repeated this, her arms stiffened, as if she had been jolted by lightning, and she squeezed my hands.
“Tutu!” she said, an ululation.
How many times had I thought about her while I was away? I had traded her language for friends who mispronounced my name, her stories for southern deference and suburban preteen angst. The smell of her foods, the way she pounded potato greens in that wooden pot, holding the pounding stick tightly with both hands at its crown, the dance of mothers come and gone, to make the harvest softer, easier to digest.
I held her hand. Would this heal the sourness of my dreams? Remember, she said, the sound of music, those songs about our childhood before the war, those romantic overtures, a reckoning. Remember, she said, you girls were like them, waving toward the children assembled for games in the open yard outside her gate. I was precocious, she said. I had run out into the field, she said. And while I cried, no matter how hard I cried, when she called my name I stopped, at once, because she said I seemed to know that tears were a way of letting the world know that the healing, the work, had already been done.
“Uhn wa meh lugn,” Ol’ Ma said in Vai, and an aunty called for her nurse.
“Take her. She will take her,” Papa said, gesturing my way to take my grandmother to her room.
“Oh. Okay,” I said nervously. I quickly glanced between him and Mam, only then remembering my parents’ warning, that the woman I remembered, so vibrant and young, our surrogate in my recollections of the war, could now barely walk on her own. I lifted her from her seat, and she gripped my wrists, firmly. She leaned backward, as if her body would collapse, or melt, and I pulled lightly. I drifted across the porch toward the front door, and my Ol’ Ma hobbled beside me, her body shrunken with years, her head tie dangling from her shoulders. She who once sold her inherited lappas to be traded in Junde during the war so we could eat. She who carried me across those fields and now relied on my direction, my pace. I felt her breathing in my hands, in her grasp, every step an introspection of those months of running.
When I was a girl, I wanted only for the dreams to stop. I wanted white space in my sleep so that I did not jump when shadows arose from the stirring sun. I wanted that medicine man to cut the demons out of my mind—remnants of a past of images now parasites of my imagination. When the sounds of the night, no matter how sweet, how familiar, intruded, I crawled sobbing across the hall and hid between Mam and Papa as they slept. They pulled me close to them and sometimes Mam wept with me. They laid their hands on my forehead and pleaded my case to God as Mam’s voice rifted and split open. Nothing worked.
One Sunday they told me the story of the beggar at the Siloam Pool—about how Jesus rubbed mud on his eyes and thereafter he could see. My teacher expressed concern about the stories I was writing in class—talking and running trees, houses with hands, singing dragons. Mam became afraid that year when she heard stories of American authorities taking children away from their homes if they were not cared for properly, and they could not afford therapy for me so sometimes while we played and she thought I was not looking, I saw her wipe her eyes during a deadlock gaze in my direction.
This blind beggar—it was his bath in the Siloam Pool that cleaned his eyes and restored his sight. I was just a girl, but I decided I would be baptized.
And Papa and Mam had gently pushed me to a pastor waiting in the water. I touched his hand as my bare feet got acquainted with the floor of the pool. The water was warm. It was the closest I had been to touching the cross behind the pulpit and I would have stretched out my hand but I knew that Papa would not be pleased.
“I now baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” the pastor said and sunk me into the pool.
Underneath the surface, my hands and feet extended to either side of me and I opened my eyes through the thick liquid haze. I came toward three ceiling lights in the distance and the water pushed against my skinny limbs and crept into me through hollows. That is the moment I should have thought of God and my healing, but instead I thought of my Ol’ Ma. Mam told me Ol’ Ma would never be baptized because she was Muslim, and as the pastor lifted me I was overwhelmed with sadness. I will never leave her behind, I thought.
“Never leave you behind,” I whispered that night on the porch to my Ol’ Ma as the iguanas cased Ol’ Ma’s steps and the laughter of Mam and her sisters resonated throughout Logan Town.
“What did you say?” Mam asked from across the porch, watching me still.
“Nothing,” I answered.
Another lizard revealed itself from behind the leg of Papa’s chair and scurried to the porch steps to the outlying yard.
“Another one!” I said. “Why are there so many? Geez.”
“They’re everywhere,” Papa said.
“You know,” Mam said, laughing, “one of my students told me the people here believe that the reason there are so many more lizards and iguanas now versus NormalDay is that they are the spirits of those lost during the war.”
They laughed at the thought and continued talking, kept eating those peppered dishes into the evening, while children were relentless in their games beyond the gate. And I watched those lizards more closely now, tried to catch their eyes in their beats of rest and inquisition, when their bodies became still and their necks lengthened, looking for what? For whom? When the next one tarried near the porch gate, not far from where I sat, I extended my hand and it scampered away, hid in a bush, and something about the brush, the day, the words made me smile in its direction.
“Death is not the end,” I thought I said to myself.
EIGHTEEN
“Agnes? Can you hear me?” I said on a call back to America a few days later.
For three years after the Second Liberian Civil War, which ended in 2003, a casual acquaintance, Agnes Fallah Kamara-Umunna, hosted a show called Straight from the Heart from a UN-sponsored radio station in Monrovia. She had visited a slum and found a shanty with fourteen former child soldiers she later interviewed, and thereafter she began to air the testimonies of victim rebels on her show. She gathered testimonies, interviewed victims and warlords, and even convinced some former child soldiers to testify at Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. She was the only person I knew who had access to the postwar rebel communities in Liberia.
“Yes, I can hear you,” Agnes responded in that hybrid Sierra Leonean and Liberian accent.
“Good. Listen, Agnes, I’m in Liberia. I came back and I think … I think I’d like to find a rebel soldier. A woman.”
“What?” she asked from what sounded like a moving car.
“Yes. One of Taylor’s rebels,” I said. “Her name is Satta. She was from Cape Mount, but that’s all I know.”
“I know too many with that name,” she laughed. I tried to explain the story, though I knew I was unclear, stuttering. What was there to tell? Mam sent a woman to get us out of the war. I had come back. I wanted to find her.
“Listen, you should talk to somebody on the ground in Liberia. I can’t help you,” Agnes said, and instead convinced me to take the number of one of her contacts who would. “He is safe, don’t worry,” she said. Agnes convinced me that if he did not know Satta, he was the most likely person to know how I could find her.
After writing down the name and ending the call, I closed my notebook. For eight months my dreams had been seized by the image of that woman. A teenage girl, younger than I am now, a scarred, plainclothes rebel, a gun slung over her shoulder, a jug of oil in her grasp—she came bearing gifts.
I opened my notebook again, transported to that moment in Lai as I gazed at the number. Agnes had given me the name of a man who fought during the First Liberian Civil W
ar as a general under Prince Johnson’s faction, INPFL. For a couple of days after getting the number, I hunted opportunities to tell Papa and Mam. I brought up our time in Lai more than usual, with a strong focus on the day Satta came.
“I told you everything I know,” Mam sighed with exasperation. “Do you know how hard it will be to find a woman named Satta Fahnbulleh in Liberia? That’s like looking for Maria Gonzalez in Mexico.”
My parents grew impatient with my questions, and I found myself taking walks around the university’s Fendell Campus, where they worked and had an apartment. Papa once casually mentioned that the security guards were mostly ex-rebels, and like a mosquito drawn to rainy season skin, I loitered near their stations in wonder. First I asked for directions to Papa’s office in the engineering school. They smiled so widely it reduced their eyes to slits, they were courteous, friendly, all welcoming me to their neighborhood and spaces. The questions ballooned into suggestions for how to improve my colloqua, the Liberian pidgin that had become ruler in the mouths of the country’s youth. By the third day, I walked to one of their stands at the side gate, where a man named Deek sat in an old wraparound school desk from six thirty in the morning to seven at night. Over the week, the conversations got longer each day, after I insisted to Mam that I’d stroll to Papa’s office, or wanted to give Deek a bottle of water after we’d arrived home from a day of exploration and reunions. I had a bottle of water on the day that I finally decided to speak to him about the war.
“Hi there.” I waved and he ran toward me, to lessen my effort.
“Hey Ma,” he said, reaching me, a short and stocky man with dark skin and hopeful eyes. “You got something for me today?”
“Water again,” I said, and stomached the disappointment that coated his eyes.
I offered chitchat about my day and his, and perhaps it was general anxiety about the question, or my intentions, but I blurted: “I want talk to you about the war.”
“The war?” he asked, confused.
“Well, yeh. I’ve been trying to find a woman who was a rebel, and I heard maybe you knew some rebels.” I tripped over the words, then quickly tried to front an ease, but it was too late. His eyes glazed over and at once the wall that stood between us was revealed as smoke, and the false hope that I could have such a conversation without an introduction, a caveat, as a foreigner, as he understood me, and any Liberian who spent the years I did away from home, punched my throat, and I was immediately sorry.
“Who you looking for?” Deek asked, placing his hands in his pocket, and my heart pounded and those dark memories returned in flashes.
“A woman who fought, but we will talk. We will talk,” I said, turning quickly from him and returning to my parents’ apartment, not looking back, although I heard him say “Okay” or “See you tomorrow, Ma” or “Thank you for the water” and I could not believe I was so daft, so foolish, so brazenly audacious. I dared not look back.
Inside the apartment, Mam was in the kitchen while Papa sat in the living room reading. He looked down at the book in his hand and rubbed the side of his head, in the way he did when he was not processing the words he read.
“Where did you go?” Papa asked, still looking at his book.
“To talk to Deek,” I said, trying to be casual, indiscernible.
“Why?” Papa asked and looked up at me, but spoke before I could respond. “Your Mom says you looking for that woman? Why?”
“I … I don’t know,” I admitted. “Curious, I guess.”
“Be careful,” he said. “You hear me?”
“Yeh,” I nodded aggressively. Those eyes of his, in that look he gave when he returned to the cavities of my dreams, and those months of running.
“The guns are still buried,” he said, his eyes, true, still undone, digging into mine.
His voice was softer than I expected; he sounded reserved, forgiving of my oblivion and uncertainty. Before I could begin, Mam walked into the bedroom where I sat conducting the interview, startling me.
“Who are you talking to?” she whispered, a beautiful head peeking through the door frame.
“Someone who may know about … Satta,” I answered quickly, then shook my hand and waved her away, mouthing that I’d tell her later. “You girl, you crazy? Don’t bring your American thing here,” I was sure she would say with a stern, chastising tone and lecture about my safety during the visit.
After an unsuccessful attempt at small talk that likely unmasked my fear of the conversation and his history, I divulged details about my search for Satta, almost whispering, in the same way I had shared with Agnes. When I spat out the last word, I felt dizzy, as if I were dreaming that conversation and the circumstances around it.
“I know of some like that,” he said after I spoke. “Even the worst of them, who were helping the people escape and cross the border.”
“Wait, what? Really?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Sometimes you know what they doing, you just turn your eye. Other times …”
It was an understood silence.
“I will help you,” he said with ease.
I was taken aback by his generosity and wanted immediately to talk to Agnes about what he owed her that was so valuable that he was so willing to help me. In my right mind I perhaps would have hurried off the phone, but the same curiosity that birthed my search formed other words for the general, questions he welcomed, like why, and at times in the conversation, it seemed, missed. I learned he’d become a Church of God pastor, although he had no congregation. Rather than preaching, he began a rehabilitation ministry for former rebels addicted to cocaine, dujee, and by-products of crack. In a process he called “dry detox” initiated in 2007, young boys were asked to sign a form forfeiting their basic human rights for full immersion in his program. They then spent three days in a dark cell with a meal a day of beans and milk.
“It is spiritual,” he said. “I want them to come out of the darkness physically, but I want them to come out spiritually too.” And had they? After emerging from the first three days, the boys were tortured by withdrawal tremors; if the boys still did not escape, they were bathed with cold water and the counseling began.
The young bodies of the prince’s soldiers danced in my memory—their invisible drums and the guns and lives they carried. Meanwhile, stories across the world went on. The general’s, and those stretched across vast plains and always resurrecting cities of the west, and mine. God had forgiven him, he said, and that was enough. He did not answer to man but to God and that familiar litany, the song the guilty play on repeat.
After hanging up the phone, I sat unmoved on the edge of the bed, in silence. I was not sure what my exact expectations of the conversation were, but as I sat there I wanted more.
The air-conditioning wall unit sputtered from the surges of an unreliable generator, my parents’ voices floated toward me in murmurs from the adjacent room, life moved about outside the window—laughing children, market women, students—and I sat in stillness.
Two days later the general called me with news that he did not find any woman who fought for his faction or others named Satta. Instead, he gave me contact information for two pastors who directed me to another woman named Agnes, each of whom said things very similar to the story I told them of Satta.
By now I had admitted to Mam what I had been up to, and after sucking her teeth at my foolishness, she then insisted my conversations were all to take place in her vicinity. I spoke to Agnes on a Tuesday afternoon, on a phone call in my parents’ living room.
“Hi, hello,” I said, smiling, looking at Mam, who sat on the living room sofa periodically glancing at the phone, as if it were the woman herself.
“Yeah, hello,” she answered.
A thirty-eight-year-old wife and mother of four from Kakata, Liberia, Agnes had fought with the general and INPFL. As a young teenager, she joined his faction, not by force like many other girls who fought during that time, but out of obligation to her family.
&
nbsp; “I did not have support,” she said. “If I joined, I was promised protection and food for my family.”
She killed almost immediately, but out of fear for her life, she remained with the rebel army. “I helped who I could,” she said. During the war there were various checkpoints where rebels would line up civilians and ask where they were from and to which tribe they belonged. If the civilian or group was suspected to be from an opposing side, they were killed. To help civilian Liberians, Agnes and other women rebels, like Satta, made a habit of lying at checkpoints.
“They would ask the people where they were from and I would speak up and say they were my tribe or my family so the boys wouldn’t kill them,” she said. Agnes was lucky to have lived after saving dozens of people during her time with INPFL. According to her, there were many like herself and Satta during both wars.
There was a young girl who fought with her who, after realizing what Agnes was doing, tried to save some innocent families herself. “They lined up the family and were yelling at them that they were Krahn,” Agnes explained. The girl, younger than her, spoke up and said they were distant cousins. “She begged them not to kill the people. She said they were Bassa.” The rebels held the family overnight and on the following morning, after it was determined that the family was indeed Krahn, they stood the teenage girl with them and shot them all.
“The woman who was known most for this was B,” Agnes said. “She lied and said people were family and friends during checkpoints and she helped plenty of them cross the border.” The last Agnes had heard, B had escaped to Sierra Leone after rebels discovered her “crimes” and sought to kill her.
“And you have never heard of Satta?” I asked again, wondering if Satta was ever as fortunate as B, or if her sacrifice for my family was her last. The thought made me weak. “I don’t think so, no,” Agnes said. “But … but if you can meet me in town tomorrow, maybe I bring somebody with me to talk more about the war.”