by Wayétu Moore
“Really?” I asked, eyes widening at Mam, who stopped what she was doing. She pointed to her chest and I nodded toward the gesture. I knew she would come.
“And we will send her the place,” Mam added.
“I can text you where to meet us. That would be great.”
I wondered if she also thought my search was absurd—if she thought I was wasteful for chasing someone many, like my parents, and even maybe she, believed no longer existed, crazy for ignoring the fact that some saints, even mine, will die.
“Okay,” she said in a high-pitched voice.
Mam and I woke up early the next morning to beat traffic into town, where we told Agnes to meet us at a ground floor café. Papa insisted that his occasional driver, a bearded gray-haired man named Sumo who always wore a hat, would take us. On the drive there I kept looking over at Mam, who seemed as eager as I was to potentially find ourselves one step closer to Satta.
“I think I want to talk to Deek more,” I told her.
“The guard?”
“Yeah, and others like him.”
“Why?” she asked, shaking her head.
“I still don’t know. Curiosity, intrigue, answers. How does anyone live with that kind of past on their shoulders?”
Mam shook her head again and shifted her gaze to the lives outside the truck window. Mam and I arrived at the café and ordered a few pastries and tea, sitting near the window so Agnes and her contact would be able to see us. We could see Papa’s truck and Sumo from where we sat; he watched and waited patiently, nodding toward us any time we looked his way. I sent a text: “We are here. Right near the entrance,” which was answered with “Ok. Coming.”
Mam stared at me occasionally from a book she was reading. I caught her as I read from my notebook, particularly from notes I’d taken while talking to the general. I did not think I would have time to speak in depth with Deek, so I made notes of questions I would ask during my next visit. About an hour after, when we did not see or hear from Agnes, I texted her again: “How far are you?” This time I received no response.
“What did she say?”
I shook my head, and Mam’s eyes returned to the pages of her book. So I called. No answer.
“You gave the correct location, right?” Mam asked some moments later.
“Yeah,” I said.
I added more questions to the notebook, sporadically tapping my pencil on the corners of the pages. I looked out of the window at Sumo, at traffic now resembling yesterday’s, at pedestrians on the early-morning road to see if one of them were her.
I went to the bathroom and returned. I ordered more tea, more croissants. Twice.
“We should head back,” Mam said finally, close to noon. “I have work to do.”
“Why? I think maybe she’s in traffic. You know how it can be,” I refuted.
Mam stood up.
“Come on, this is important. Just let me call again,” I insisted.
“You now call plenty. You’re wasting your time.”
“You can leave me here,” I said. “Sumo can take you to work and come back for me.”
Mam sighed, reluctant. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’m just going to pick up something from campus and we will be right back.”
“Okay.”
“Less than an hour—”
“Cool.”
“—and when I come back we’re going home. She will not have you just sitting around all day.”
“Okay, that’s fine.”
She grabbed her book and her purse, and strolled out of the café to where Sumo waited. As they drove off, I became more obsessed with the faces of pedestrians. I studied each one, although I would not have known her if she were looking me in the face. I jotted down notes again, reviewing the questions I would ask. I texted: “Everything okay?” and called and called again. And as if the day had a vendetta, Mam and Sumo returned, my heart dropping when I noticed Papa’s truck turn the corner.
Mam did not ask me questions on the drive home. She did not have to. When I climbed into the truck, she shook her head, in disappointment but also what seemed to be disgust at the missed appointment.
“This too is Liberia,” she whispered in her corner, and I ignored it, kept gazing outward.
It was not until we entered the apartment that the sadness, the absurdity that I hoped to be reunited with this woman, hit me. That I wanted to see her again to touch her, to thank her, to understand myself. The gravity of that season, the breakups and contemplation and wanting, disassembled me.
“What?” Mam said, immediately rushing to me, and I kept warding her off, pushing her off my skin. “What? It’s okay,” she said and I wanted to throw something but also to be held by her. “It will be okay. Don’t mind these people. What?” she insisted and I pulled away again. I did not want to be in her embrace, but to look her in the face, in her eyes as I cried.
“What?” Mam asked, her lips trembling now, about to break.
“Why did you leave?”
RAINY
SEASON
NINETEEN
When I tell them the story, I say that 1990 was the year I cried. I tell them all year I looked out of my window in New York City, and I cried because I could no longer hear their voices. I was twenty-eight years old when I left Liberia. When the semester ended in December 1989, I returned to Caldwell while I was on vacation from school, and went back to New York only two short weeks later. I wore only dresses then, country cloth to Ankara. Sometimes, I let the girls wipe the lipstick from my lips with their fingers and rub it across their own. They did that the morning I left, taking turns smearing that serious color. I promised them that I would see them again during the rainy season in June when I was on vacation from school.
I arrived in New York, and the weather was so different from our Liberian dry season that my teeth clattered. I cried during the entire flight, rubbing my fingers against their pictures under the lamp of my window seat. When I tell them the story, I tell them that by the time I landed, my eyes were red and after exiting customs, I ran into a taxi. New Year’s Eve was a few short days away so the streets in Harlem were busy with tourists. I had lived in New York for five months then, with another Fulbright from Japan named Yasuka, and an American woman named Anne, but when I got back to the apartment, they were not there. The silence made it even colder, and it was so cold that night I did not even unpack. I took off my shoes and climbed into bed, covering my body with sheets and blanket to keep warm. When that still felt too cold, and the bite of it reminded me of my sadness, I thought of him—Gus. I thought of my daughters and wondered what they were eating, if Korkor and Torma were helping them with their lessons, if they were happy. My thoughts were not peppered with their memory, they did not peek around the corners of my mind during the day; it was their ever-present memory that was seasoned with my thoughts, so that when I finished deciding whether I would wipe my eyes before falling asleep, or briefly wondered what I would do the following day, they were still there, never leaving my mind.
Ol’ Ma says it takes a special man, a good man, to give his wife a blessing to leave him. That is what Gus did for me. I wanted to study in America, where I imagined everyone lived in buildings as tall as clouds, from Gus’s stories of the few months he moved here shortly after the coup, and he told me I should come. Ol’ Ma said that these special men are clever and confident, so confident that they trust their choice of women, and they would never choose women who would not return to them. So when I received the letter stating that I had won the Fulbright scholarship, Gus, in his specialness, encouraged me to go.
“You are right. You can’t say no to the Fulbright. And at Columbia. In America!” he said, picking me up and dancing around the den, holding me close.
My Ma and Pa threw me a party at their house in Logan Town. I am the youngest of five girls and I have more cousins than I can count, so the house was crowded with familiar faces. Ma was known for her cooking and news spread that I would leave soon. I liked L
ogan Town most then, when guests filled even the yard around the plum tree. I spoke to Ma in the kitchen that day, stroking her hands as my girls played with the curtains in the corner.
“People are talking,” I told her.
“About what?” Ol’ Ma asked.
“That I have no business going to America when I have a husband and three daughters. They’re saying he makes enough money and there is no need for me to go.”
Ma made a deep sound, the sort of sigh she gave to ward off the enemies of her daughters, no matter how many rivers away.
“It’s a master’s degree, Ma,” I said. “I can come back and do plenty with it. Maybe one day I can even work at the education ministry. Can you imagine?”
My Ma had told me that she was happy that we had all listened to her and gotten jobs and an education, no matter how well our husbands did.
She asked me about Gus and I looked across the house to her sitting room, where he sat with a group of men, holding a Malta. He was the first and only man I had ever loved. We married while we were still at the University of Liberia and started having children right away. First Wi, then Tutu, then K. He was a special man—I knew what Ol’ Ma said was true—and even if I were to tell him that I wanted to move to Russia or to Vietnam or to Iceland, places too far away, if he knew those things would make me happy, he would have said yes.
The airport was busy and loud when he told me goodbye. He did not want me to miss my flight, so he rushed me. He was nervous, and I could tell because he acted the same way when he was watching a very important football game and Oppong Weah or another player he rooted for was going to lose.
“Make sure you read to the girls in the night,” I said, stopping at the gate.
“If one of them gets sick, you call me, yeh? Even if it’s just a cough, call me. Visit the Ol’ Ma’s house when you have time. They still want to see you. She says she will come visit plenty and help you with the girls. And be careful what you eat now that I’m not here. Don’t get sick. You get sick this time, I won’t be here to make pepper soup. You won’t have my pepper soup and you will have to drink some other dry thing with no taste. You better call me, yeh? Anyway, if you don’t call me, I will call you.”
I looked into his face and he looked like he was waiting for me to cry, because that is all I had been doing that day. He hugged me and told me that he would be all right with the girls in Liberia, and that I could trust him. But I did not cry then. I looked into his face, that nervousness now trapped. Before I could say anything else, he wrapped his arms around my shoulder and squeezed.
“I love you, yeh?” I said in his ear, and I hugged each of my daughters, pulling them in.
My sadness was there also, and the same nervousness as his, but I kissed his cheek and hugged him tightly.
“Bye, Mam,” he said, and those would be the last words I heard from him for some time. They watched my plane until they could no longer see it—a container to my weeping, my regret.
TWENTY
“Mam.” I heard a low voice outside my bedroom door, followed by a series of knocks.
I sat up in bed and lifted the drapes of my window to let in some light. But it was cold there, so my drapes never stayed opened for long.
“Happy New Year, roomie,” Yasuka, my roommate, said, smiling when I opened the door. She always brought me tea, so when we saw each other for the first time that year, she carried a tea set on a tray.
I let Yasuka into my room and returned to my bed to lie down. Yasuka, also an international student at Teachers College, was my closest friend. Yasuka left to visit her family in Japan on the same day I left for Liberia. She was my height and shared my slender build, my sense of humor, and my love of rice. We studied together, ate together, and the only time I didn’t care for her was when I had to pull leftover strands of Yasuka’s long black hair out of the bathroom drain so I would not have to shower in a puddle.
“What did you do for New Year’s Eve?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t been feeling well since getting back.”
“That was a week ago!” Yasuka asked.
“Just a bit homesick,” I said. Yasuka was clumsy at responding to sadness, so in the first days she got back to America, we spent a lot of time in silence. She took care of me, and made sure I had medicine. She did things like tie the drapes with a string on the sill, so that the sunlight could fill the room.
“It was good to be home,” Yasuka said. “I miss my family too. They are proud of me, like your family, and your daughters are proud of you. They want you here to finish,” Yasuka said. I appreciated her words and encouragement.
“Any news about your president?” Yasuka asked, drinking from her cup.
“It’s still the same,” I said, and my head ached to think about it. “The president does not want to step down and they say rebels are coming to remove him. But my husband says it will be quick and everything will be back to normal.”
“When will you go back again?” Yasuka asked.
“During rainy season. Summer. June,” I said.
“That’s good!” Yasuka said cheerfully. “It will come soon. You will see.”
I changed the subject to talk about school, and I always did this when my body became cold from the thoughts of war. We talked about the program, classmates we were looking forward to seeing when school resumed the following week, how we would use our degrees to affect our countries. There were so many words that I wanted to share instead of what we spoke of, things I was afraid of, thoughts creeping in dark corners, waiting quietly for their time.
The city was less and less foreign to me each day. I would visit the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, and Carnegie Hall. I liked New York, although everyone seemed to move quickly here, fighting the concrete for time and money. Passing faces on the street, I would imagine the homes they had come from, the daughters they were going to see, to read to, the aging mothers to whom they had just fed soup.
What I liked least about the city was that, although I spoke English, people acted as if they did not understand me. I eventually learned to speak slowly, becoming patient, so that people would understand.
“You must not lose yourself there, that’s all,” Ma had told me before I left. “Look into your mirror in the night and when you start seeing you not the same, come home.”
I did look different, but I felt different after that December visit.
It was in New York that I first felt invisible, as if nobody could see me. People did not look at my neck or eyes as they did in Monrovia. Outside my classrooms I was hardly looked in the eye. People in New York walked like they were in a dream. When I was out at restaurants with classmates who were white, waiters talked to my classmates before they talked to me. And if I went to the store with a white friend to look for something, the person at the store always spoke to the white person first, and it made me feel small.
“What is a white person?” my daughter asked once on the phone.
“A person with pale skin,” I said. “Like Ms. Walters.”
Ms. Walters went to our church in Caldwell. The girls were in disbelief that she was white when I told them.
“How your series coming along?” Gus would ask me during our weekly calls.
“I na speaking series-oh,” I joked. “And if you just saw the way the people look at me when I open my mouth, hmph. Like I did something wrong.”
During our calls, I wished the phone handle was his hand.
“Don’t let it bother you,” Gus said.
“I’m trying,” I said. “How the girls?”
“They fine,” he said proudly. “Torma doing well with them.”
“I knew she would.”
“And Tutu-geh will turn five next month and she say she want big party,” he said.
“Give it to her. An April party will be beautiful. Invite everybody,” I said.
“You all right?” Papa asked.
“I’m still not feeling like myself since Ch
ristmas,” I said. “Sometimes I want to just pack my bags and come back home.” This was an admission. When I tell them the story, I tell them that the only thing that made me stay was wanting my daughters to know that they could go after anything they wanted, that they could fly too.
“That’s nonsense,” he said. “You almost finished with your first year. June three months away.”
“Yeh.”
“If it continue, then go see doctor,” he said.
“I will.” I had promised him I would stop worrying about the rumors of war. There was nothing about Liberia on television, so during every call I asked questions. What is the latest? Has Doe stepped down yet to avoid trouble? Do you think the rebels will be successful? What will happen to you all? Have you thought of the worst-case scenario? Shouldn’t we talk about what we will do? How many rebels will it take to remove him if they are serious? And how long? Will his soldiers put up a fight? And what will happen to the children? How are you explaining all this news to the girls? He ended up telling me that I was worrying myself too much, and that we should not talk about the war at all.
“Just worry about finishing there and coming home,” he had said.
So when our conversation became silent and all I could hear was the sound of breathing, I hoped he knew what I wanted to ask.
“All is well, Mam,” he said. “Just finish there and come back to us.”
TWENTY-ONE
One Sunday in April before a study session, I visited Calvary Baptist Church on Fifty-Seventh Street with Yasuka, to hear a missionary speak on his travels to Liberia. I heard about the church from a friend at Columbia and was happy to have found a Baptist church where I could go talk to God. I wanted to get a good seat that day to ask questions, but made sure to sit at the end of the pew in case I became dizzy. It had been four months since my Christmas visit and I had not been able to shake the ill feeling I had since returning to New York.