by Wayétu Moore
TWENTY-THREE
My baby was due at the end of September and my second school year had just begun. With Facia and Bom in the apartment I was more comfortable leaving, and I questioned them about phone calls as soon as I got home. Facia had found a job to help with the living expenses my scholarship could not cover. I had trouble paying attention in class, and if anyone asked me about Liberia or my family, I tiptoed around the truth, careful not to step on broken glass.
I had not heard from them since May, and Facia and I had no way of knowing where anyone was or if the family in Logan Town had all successfully made it to Lai. On September 9, a BBC news desk reported that Johnson had wounded and captured Doe and had declared himself president until elections could be held. Not even one week later, Prince Johnson and Charles Taylor were now fighting against each other. Prince Johnson ordered his men to seize the rest of Monrovia at all cost, even if it meant leveling the city.
When I was not at class I was in my apartment, the telephone an arm’s length away. I hoped the baby would wait just a little while until the war outside was over, so his father would not miss his birth.
On a Thursday morning while I waddled and paced around the rooms of the apartment to the accompaniment of CNN, the phone rang.
“Hello?” I asked, out of breath after rushing to the phone.
“Hello? Hello, Mam?” I was asked. There was static, white noise on the other side.
“Hello?” I yelled into the phone. “Can you hear me?”
The white noise continued but I held the phone close to my face, refusing to hang up.
“Hello?” I yelled again.
“Hello?” I heard again, and the white noise quieted.
“Who is this?” I asked, unable to recognize the voice.
“Amos. This Amos,” he said.
“Amos?!” I yelled. “Oh my! Hi! How are you?! Where are you?!”
“I’m in Ghana. I was able to leave Liberia,” he said with a wide relief that I could hear in his voice.
I was happy for him, yet his voice was like the prick of a needle. I looked down at my stomach.
“Oh, God bless you, Amos. Thank you for calling. I am well.”
“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “But that is not why I am calling.”
My heart dropped.
“What?” Facia asked.
“What is it, Amos? What’s wrong?”
“I called around for weeks to find you. Once I arrived in Ghana. I called family around America looking for Liberians in New York, then when I found Liberians in New York I had to find someone who knew people at Columbia. I am so happy I found you.”
“Amos, what is wrong?” I asked again.
“Gus is alive. I know there is no way you can know so I wanted to make sure I told you.”
I screamed into the phone and raised my hands toward the ceiling.
“They’re alive,” I repeated, crying to Facia.
“He saved my life, Mam. Rebel almost kill me and Gus gave him money to let me go. I walked with them first but we parted. They were going to Lai. I believe they made it.”
“They in Lai,” I said, now laughing.
“Praise God,” Facia said and danced around the apartment.
The white noise returned and I thanked Amos through the haze. I was getting ready to hang up the phone when on the other side I heard Amos asking me to wait.
“Amos? Amos, I am still here,” I said.
“I am sorry, Mam. But I must tell you there are some rumors I have been hearing from people who escaped from the Cape Mount area,” he said.
“What? What rumor you hear?” I asked.
“They are saying Charles Freeman, the Ol’ Pa, is dead. That he was killed. He was looking for food in Burma and the rebels them mistook him for a Mandingo leader and shot him. The Ol’ Pa is dead. They say he was killed.”
That a day could be so bittersweet. That a day could be so cynical. That life could be so cruel, so vicious. I dropped the phone and tilted my head back. I clenched my dress, unable to breathe, and I screamed into the morning, screamed from my depths, from the ends of my fingers, screamed into the morning that a day could be so merciless, that a year could be so cold. Screamed into the morning until I had nothing left.
TWENTY-FOUR
The griots and the djelis do not write down their stories. They are divine tellers with memories that span thousands of years of our history. They never needed to write. Their memories are scripture. They tell the Ol’ Mas all that is and all that ever was and, on some occasions, what will be. Those Ol’ Mas tell their grandchildren, and when those grandchildren become Ol’ Mas, they tell their grandchildren, and when these grandchildren become Ol’ Mas, they tell their grandchildren, and so on. This is how we recite scripture. This is how the truth was kept, how some decisions were made, and so I paid attention when the Ol’ Mas told stories they had heard from their griots and djelis.
For instance, they said that you can tell a lot about what is to come by your dreams, and by the way your unborn child enters the world. If you dream of snakes, it means that someone will soon die. If you dream of water, a lake or the ocean, it means that someone will soon give birth. If children are not born crying, they will give much trouble when they get older. If children are born feet first, if they somehow manage to stand upright inside their mothers, then a battle is coming, and the mothers will win.
These superstitions lived on even with the growth of Christianity—children chewing bones in their sleep to wish death to a parent, thrusting a special dust on enemies to give them leprosy—all possible, even under a Christian God. So when the doctors told me that I would need a C-section, my first, showing me the image of my son standing upright inside me, it made me smile. It was the first time I had smiled in weeks, since the rumors of Ol’ Pa’s death reached us. I considered everything about Amos’s call. His raspy voice, as though he had also been crying for longer than anyone should, stirring all that good news with the bad.
That year had made me cynical, but I still believed that everything had meaning. The call I received, the call I had been waiting for, came from a man who would have been killed had it not been for Gus. And whatever circumstance led to them being on that dusty road on that day, at that time, whatever stroke of luck made the encounter with that rebel go as it did, it happened, and I understood it to be a direct act of God, having meaning beyond what I could understand.
These things were reminders of my smallness and the many ways life functioned outside my control; but there were those coincidences that gave me a glimpse, though I was small, of just how powerful I could be. And I wanted to tell my daughters this. I wanted to teach them their power and remind them of it every day I could, especially during the seasons they felt small. I wanted to see them grow to be mothers themselves. I wanted to see them fall in love. I wanted to be there when they graduated from school. I wanted to make them soup when they cried, and to tell them sorry I was not there.
They said my son was standing inside me, that he had chosen to straighten his back before entering what was then the coldest world, and I thought of those lives in Liberia. The griots and djelis would say that something was to come, that a battle was approaching beyond moons, that all of these things were the answer I had been praying for. So as the anesthesia entered my bloodstream and the ceiling lights blinded my eyes to closing, I thought of Liberia, my home, now a battleground calling for my return.
TWENTY-FIVE
Roy’s office was in the basement of Teachers College at Columbia. I met him when I was only in middle school—he had come to Liberia with the Peace Corps and taught me social studies. He made a point to keep in touch with his former students from Liberia, especially those who had moved to America. I visited him frequently, gathering whatever news I had recently obtained about the state of Liberia to make conclusions about where my family could be. Roy had a thick gray mustache and beard that accented his pink face and head, a beard that shriveled as he spoke with an unlik
ely Liberian accent.
I entered Roy’s office and immediately headed to a chair between overflowing boxes. Stacks of papers were piled on and around his desk and the tables around the office. He was writing something, but stood up as soon as I walked in to give me a hug.
“Here’s the new mom,” he said in that way he spoke to his Liberian friends, words singing. He looked at me like many people did that year—he was sorry for me and covered it with a smile.
“I trying,” I said, sitting down. I didn’t remove my coat, still mistrusting New York winters.
“Are you sure you had baby?” Roy asked.
“Thank you,” I said.
“How is the boy? You’re eating?”
“Everybody’s doing well,” I said. “Facia’s been helping.”
“That’s good.”
“And yes, I’m eating. I’m taking care of myself for the baby,” I continued.
“Good. You hear anything yet?”
“Not after Amos’s call,” I said. “That why I’m here, actually.”
Roy listened carefully, as he always did.
“I decided I’m going back,” I said.
The chair Roy sat in swiveled and he creased his eyebrows.
“I’ve been praying about it and it is the only option since the people still fighting. I have to go get them,” I continued.
“Mam,” he interrupted, “I assume I am not the first person who’s said this and I won’t be the last, but this is very risky.”
“I know.”
“Very risky.”
“It’s my only option. I can’t concentrate on anything knowing they still in hiding. Who knows when the fighting will stop?”
“Still, it’s very risky,” Roy said. “You don’t want to wait? They say it will be over soon.”
“They said that before it started and now look,” I argued. “Facia has a friend in Sierra Leone I can stay with while I try to cross the border and get to Lai.”
“Mam, that isn’t possible,” he said.
“Some months ago I didn’t know where they were. I thought they were dead,” I said. “I have this information and I have to do something with it.”
“Okay. Okay,” Roy said. “How? Tell me how you plan to go about this.”
I had thought about it for weeks. I had rehearsed their escape day and night while I fed and held my new son, his face so familiar, so much like Gus’s. I thought of it in every class, distracted during lectures about the details.
“I want to leave in one month’s time. Early December. I will go to Sierra Leone to Facia’s friend in Freetown. I hear I can take a bus to the border town and rent a room, and Facia says once I am there I can find people who can send word to them in the village that I am close. Lai is close to that border town. Only one day walking. That way Gus can come meet me there and I can bring them back,” she said.
“But what if you don’t find someone who is willing to go? Few people will risk their lives to go back into Liberia,” he said.
“Then I will try to sneak in and get them out,” I continued.
“They are not letting people in like that-oh,” he said.
“I would find a way.”
“But—”
“Roy,” I said, my voice almost breaking, “I have already made up my mind. I am not here to—I just need to know how many weeks of class I can miss before I lose my scholarship. And … and I need to know how to get a sponsorship letter to present to the embassy in Freetown, so I can bring them here on my student visa.”
Roy turned back toward his desk and rubbed his eyes.
“Please,” I said.
I looked away from him at the papers around his room. I was happy to have friends who cared—I had the same conversations with Facia and friends.
“How long do you plan on staying, Mam?” Roy asked.
“Until I find them,” I said. “I just want to know how long until I lose the scholarship.”
“It will depend on the professor, generally, but my guess is you will have about two to three weeks into the semester before it really affects you. So the middle of February.”
“So I have two months,” I confirmed.
Roy nodded, reluctantly.
“And if you find them—”
“—when”
“When you find them,” he edited himself, “how will you get them to New York?”
“Well, I will bring them here on my student visa,” she said. “I spoke to a friend’s lawyer. I just need a sponsorship letter and they will come on my student visa. I know it will take some time to get that settled with the embassy, a few weeks, but there’s a crisis so I think they are expediting some cases.”
“Few cases.”
“I have faith. We’ll be in the few,” I said.
“And you have money for this?”
“I am using some of my stipend and I’ve been borrowing money from friends and family,” I admitted. “But not much.”
“I know you have made up your mind. I know you love them and I can’t imagine how you feel knowing your family is stuck there,” Roy said. “But I just think the best thing you can do for yourself and for them is to stay here. Gus is safe with the girls in Lai. That much you know.”
“Not absolutely,” I said. “But yes—Amos said he was with them until the checkpoints to Junde.”
“So wait until the war is over and they return to Caldwell. Then you can think about how to bring them here with you.”
“No,” I said, without hesitation.
“No?”
“No,” I said, folding my hands in my lap. “He would do it for me if he was in my place.”
“But he is not. And he would want you to stay here,” Roy continued, unwavering.
So I asked him if he had ever been close to death. Consumed by it. I asked if he ever had mornings when even waking up seemed the most unfair burden. Eating. Bathing. And even after somehow building up the courage to wake up, every thought not directly linked to them was a betrayal. The restlessness made a home on my shoulders, tormenting me as the day went on. This was the other side of love. Love gone is painful, and I existed in that grief upon hearing news of the Ol’ Pa. But love almost gone—the lurking threat of loss—that was a daily torture, death realized every morning. And I did not know which was worse—the fear of losing them to the war, the fear that some rebels would find Lai and kill them before the war ended, and knowing that if such a thing did occur, I would not be able to go on; or admitting that I had already died, so many times that year, with my Ol’ Pa, with Liberia and hopes of returning and making the life that we planned for, with my rosebush in Caldwell likely incinerated, with my fears that my daughters were gone, those fears that delivered the most cruel lullabies every night I did not hear from them. Such is the danger of deep love, however beautiful. Dying lingers close behind.
“And if you love someone that much, that fully, what would you do?” I asked Roy, tears raining onto the scarf wrapped around my neck.
“I would go,” he said.
TWENTY-SIX
December 1990, and Freetown looked beautiful from heaven. The winding roads made a bed among Sierra Leone’s hills, so green and perfect my lungs filled with clean air. I could see the palm trees from the sky, home to coconuts and unripe plantains, nuts that would make oil for some Ol’ Ma’s cassava leaves that night. There were many people who tried to convince me to stay before I boarded the plane at LaGuardia—but in the end their memory was the only approval I needed.
I only had one small suitcase, which I carried with me on my flight, full of those dresses I had once loved. Facia had advised me to wear my long hair in a ponytail, to try to look as though I had never left. She had reminded me that for months the women there did not have those simple things that contributed to the natural beauty of West African women—a brush, lipstick, perfume, a clean dress—so I should pack the most plain dresses possible so I would not stand out.
“They will steal from you if they know you co
ming from America,” Facia had cautioned, taking the dresses I had packed out of my suitcase and replacing them with more plain, nondescript ones.
Before leaving our apartment, I held my son for what felt like an entire day. I nursed him, I sang to him and told him those stories my Ol’ Ma told me, and her Ol’ Ma had told her. I doted on his eyes and cheeks—I promised him I would be back with his father and sisters. I was able to obtain a sponsorship letter from the scholarship program, which I would use to get visas from the American embassy for them to come to New York with me. I had tried to obtain letters for my mother and sisters, but in the end, only my immediate family would be allowed back into America with me. Since the stipend was not enough for all of their plane tickets, I asked everyone I considered a friend for help. I was able to raise enough for our tickets and had a thousand dollars left for an anticipated two-month stay.
I met with Yasuka days before my flight, and like others, Yasuka asked me if I was afraid to go, if there were other options, if I had considered and planned for the worst.
“I am not afraid, no,” I answered. “I actually feel like myself again. I feel like I can breathe again.”
Yasuka looked down at the table toward the barely touched cups of tea for most of the conversation. I lifted her hand and placed it on mine, which was warmer than the temperatures outside would suggest.
“I can’t wait to meet them,” Yasuka said, finally, gracefully shielding her fear with hopefulness, just like everyone else I told.
When I exited the plane in Freetown, I was greeted by a familiar West African warmth and stuffiness. I swore I smelled all that was mingling in a smoke pot in the distance, all those things I had missed the past year. There were two lines: one for Sierra Leoneans and one for foreigners. I went to the line for foreigners and waited amid a crowded lot of British military personnel and members of various nongovernmental organizations, all wide-eyed and noticeably overwhelmed with excitement that they, too, had arrived in Africa. The airport was loud, too loud to hear myself worry. Beyond the customs counters I noticed local men in safety vests wave toward arriving passengers, offering their help with checked luggage. I approached the front of the line. I nervously pulled out my passport from a folder of traveling papers I was keeping in a purse close to my chest. I handed it to the attendant.