A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded the car. They began to rock it from side to side and bang on the trunk and hood with their fists like hammers. Most of them were shirtless, unshaven, their hair in long, springy coils. They waved their machetes and stared wild eyed into the back of the car, trying to see through the tinted glass—though I could see plainly enough their detonating faces, huge and black and wet with rain.
Two of the men thumped purposefully on Satterthwaite’s window, the leaders, evidently, ordinary workingmen in tee shirts and loose trousers. They had the faces of men who wished to negotiate. Satterthwaite lowered his window a few inches and spoke rapidly to them in pidgin.
In response, the men were shouting at Satterthwaite, as angry as the others now, apparently confused or not believing him, but he kept talking rapidly in a calm, low voice, until finally they grew quiet and listened and then at last instructed the others to back off. Satterthwaite turned and explained, “Them think we come from the president to tell the ship to give the rice to the government. Them think we the tax collectors, but now they see who we are, Miz Sundiata and her driver, so them say it all right for us to go.”
“Thank you,” I said.
It went suddenly quiet inside the car again, and the pickup pulled away from the Mercedes, freeing us to leave. Satterthwaite put the car in gear and inched forward and gave a gentle, grateful wave to the men, who politely, almost apologetically waved back.
At that moment, as if they’d been watching and waiting for us to leave the scene, a pair of army trucks filled with helmeted soldiers appeared, engines grinding, and blocked the departure of all three vehicles, the pickup, the red taxi, and the Mercedes. Two jeeps braked to a quick stop beside our car, and dozens of soldiers jumped from the trucks and jeeps and dragged the drivers from the pickup and the taxi, beating the heads and faces of the men with rifle butts, sending their now pathetic-looking machetes clattering to the pavement, kicking the men, rolling their bodies away from the Mercedes like logs. Blood sprayed from noses, ears, broken mouths, and from inside the car I heard muffled howls cut by the sound of human bones being cracked and splintered. The wild men with machetes who moments ago had terrified me were transformed with terrible efficiency into sacks and tossed into the rear of the trucks.
I yelled at Satterthwaite, “For God’s sake, get us out of here!”
A soldier waved us on. Satterthwaite hit the accelerator, and in seconds we were back on Gamba Boulevard, headed south and out of the city. I gazed out the windows through the steady rain at the nearly empty streets and alleys. Abruptly, halfway to the lab, I told Satterthwaite to turn around and drive me home. “Take the back way, stay out of town,” I said.
And so it was back to the bubble, then. When we pulled into the yard, Woodrow was standing at the door, arms folded across his chest, waiting. The dogs posed alertly beside him like sentries. He’d returned home from the ministry as soon as he learned from the radio what had happened down at the docks and was now spreading to all parts of the city.
We watched and listened to the Rice Riot, as it came to be called, from behind the high, gated wall that surrounded our home on Duport Road. The riot sprawled uphill from the waterfront, as the crowd of ordinary folks broke away from the soldiers sent to subdue them quickly became a mob led and egged on by gangs of boys and young men drunk on palm wine and high on marijuana and Lord knows what else. They stormed up the long ridge into the center of town, smashing windows and burning trash, then looting stores, dressing in looted clothing and lugging TVs, radios, tape decks, electric fans, and blenders like trophies. They overturned cars, massed in the squares and at crossroads, swelling in size and noise as they went, beating on stolen pails and cook pans, blowing whistles, chanting, dancing. It was a headless beast, thrashing in pain and confusion.
Woodrow and I and the boys, Satterthwaite, Jeannine and Kuyo, we all peered from behind the barred windows of the house and watched the smoke rise in smudged clouds, billowing skyward through the rain, first from one district, then from another, more distant district, and felt relieved that the rioters seemed to be moving south and west, away from our neighborhood and in the direction of the Liberian government buildings and the foreign embassies, towards the dead end of palm-lined Gamba Boulevard, where the bright white Executive Mansion ruled, as if the beast were moving blindly, instinctively, towards the source of its pain.
It was unclear, however, what the mob expected to do once it reached the palace. Stand outside in the thousands and raise their fists in anger and frustration? Try to tell of their sorrow and pain and hunger, their fear of having to watch their children die? Tell the foreigners of their plight, yes, tell the world, if possible, but especially tell the president, the hulking, glowering man in the blue, pinstriped Savile Row suit and exquisite Italian necktie, who looked down from his office window, gazed across the mint-green lawns and gardens to the ten-foot-high wall of wrought-iron spikes protecting the palace grounds from the street, where his people cried out and clung to the iron bars and banged against them with sticks, machetes, and fists. Tell the president, who, after a few moments of contemplating the crowd, its growing size, its fury and suicidal desperation—suicidal because they had come to the Executive Mansion, the most protected building in the country, where they had effectively trapped themselves in a cul-de-sac against an iron wall—walked calmly from the window to his desk, picked up the telephone, and called his minister of security.
Shortly after that, clanking and snorting like mechanical bulls, the tanks appeared, three of them, grinding along the boulevard towards the huge crowd, slowly passing the European and Israeli and American embassies, whose gates were locked shut from inside, the bridges over the moats raised, and behind the tanks marched a battalion of soldiers from the president’s security force. These grim men were not regular army enlistees. They came helmeted, wearing full battle gear, carrying M-16s and AK-47s. These men were not riot police, like the men we battled in Chicago in ’68 and ’69. They weren’t National Guardsmen, ill-trained reservists given unfamiliar weapons and called unexpectedly to duty, like the frightened boys who’d shot students at Kent State. No, these were men who were trained and armed and brought out of their barracks today for one purpose only, to shoot down as many people as their officers ordered, even if they had to run down and fire point-blank at members of their own tribe, killing their friends and neighbors, possibly even family members, men, women, and children, all of them unarmed, helpless against the tanks and guns.
BBC radio parroted the official Liberian News Agency’s report that seven civilians had been killed and three soldiers, and that the soldiers had fired only in self-defense. But we learned afterwards—not from any newspaper or radio broadcast, but from hushed conversations with friends and servants—that hundreds, as many as six hundred, some said, of poor and hungry, utterly defenseless Liberians were shot dead that day. Jeannine said the hospitals were filled to overflowing with injured people and had begun to turn away anyone who could not walk in and, after receiving emergency repairs, walk out. Hundreds of people had been shot point-blank, others had been crushed beneath the tanks: children in their mothers’ arms; the mothers themselves; teenaged boys and girls caught up in the riot merely because they happened to be on the streets that day, choosing a wild, out-of-control block party over a day in the classroom; men and women who may well have hoped for a coup to grow out of the riot but were not themselves guilty of plotting one, merely of hoping for one; and opportunistic, drunken thieves and looters living out a materialist fantasy. It was said that dozens of young men had been carried off in trucks and coldly executed, their dismembered bodies destroyed in vats of hydrochloric acid or secretly burned and buried in the bush. It was said that a U.S. destroyer had anchored offshore, and another, filled with U.S. Marines, was steaming over from Freetown to join it. We were told that American helicopters had been on their way from Robertsfield Airport to remove all embassy personnel, if necessary, and carry
out any U.S. citizens who considered him- or herself in danger.
Which did not include me, of course. As long as President Tolbert, my husband’s boss, remained in charge of the situation, my children and I were in no danger. And Tolbert remained in charge. By evening, a nervous, fearful calm had descended over the city, over the entire country, in fact, and the following morning the loud, hearty voice of the president boomed from the radio, telling us that thanks to the courage and discipline of the Liberian armed forces, a coup had been averted, the back of the rebellion had been broken, and a communist-inspired revolution had been thwarted. Once again the Republic of Liberia had been preserved by the brave, freedom-loving men and women of Liberia who had remained loyal to the president’s True Whig party. And to reward the people for their faithfulness to him and his party, the cruel tax on rice, which had been imposed by the Congress while secretly under the influence of certain devious and disloyal elements in the opposition, had been rescinded by presidential order. Three cheers for the True Whig party.
“Hip, hip, hooray!” the president sang. He’s drunk, I thought.
Woodrow said, “Well, I guess that settles things. We can’t allow ourselves to be ruled by mobs.”
I agreed. The good wife. Satterthwaite sagely nodded. Yas, Boss. And Jeannine hurried out to buy rice.
THE TRUE WHIG PARTY had run Liberia almost from its nineteenth-century inception, back when the country, supposedly no longer the African stepchild of America, was first declared a republic. No one we knew was opposed to the president or belonged to any party other than his. In spite of my husband’s backroom role in these events—for he was, after all, a member of the president’s administration—and in spite of the fact that my three sons were, like their father, citizens of the Republic of Liberia, my personal connections to the events remained tangential. I was like an asteroid passing through the farthest orbits of the Liberian planetary system, crossing on a long elliptical path determined eons ago in a different solar system. My and my family’s orbits had a barely measurable effect on one another. I still believed that as long as my children, my husband, and I were physically safe and reasonably comfortable, the country and I were nearly irrelevant to each other.
Then one rainy November night in 1979, seven months after the Rice Riot, I remember waking very late to the sound of deliberately lowered male voices, Woodrow’s and that of another man, coming from the living room. Their rumblings, anxious and urgent, rose slowly and then quickly fell, as if they’d remembered freshly that they didn’t want to be overheard. I slipped from bed and in the dark made my way down the hall towards the living room, and just as I reached the entryway, saw the silhouette of a large, broad-shouldered man leaving by the front door. It clicked shut, and Woodrow sat down at his desk, sighed audibly, and lighted a cigarette.
“Was that Charles?”
Without looking at me, he said, “No.” Then, after a pause, “Yes, actually. He sent you his love, but had to rush off.”
“Why was Charles here this late? Is something wrong?”
“No. Business.”
“Really? Business? It’s almost three, Woodrow.”
“Business.”
“Oh.”
He sighed a second time, giving up for the moment—too much effort to lie. “Yes. Dangerous business, actually. Charles has gone and formed a political party. To oppose the president.” He paused again. “Seems like a terrible idea. Especially now, so soon after the riots.”
“You told him that.”
“I told him that. Yes.” He explained that Charles had tried to convince Woodrow to join this new party, to be called the People’s Progressive Party, and help him organize a referendum to cut short the two years remaining on Tolbert’s eight-year term. If the referendum passed, a new election would be held in the fall. And Charles was thinking of putting himself forward for president. “He wants me to declare against the True Whig candidate and run for the Senate from Gibo, where Fuama is located. My home district.”
“This is a ridiculous idea, right? To cut yourself off from the president and the party? To oppose him?”
“Oh, definitely! Definitely ridiculous. Hopeless. But Charles is an ambitious man. And a rather reckless one.”
“And you’re not?”
“Ambitious, yes. But not reckless.”
We both remained silent for a long moment. He poured a drink from the open bottle at his desk and drank it down. Then looked up at me, half surprised to see me still standing there at the door in my nightgown. “Go to bed, Hannah darling,” he said.
“Are you safe, Woodrow?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I turned him down flat. Go to bed.”
“But does this put you against Charles now?”
“No. Not really. He may not see it that way now, but he will.”
“What about him? Is Charles safe?”
“He’ll be fine, as long as his referendum never gets held. And it won’t. There’s no way the president will permit it. And with no referendum, there’ll be no early election. Good night, my dear. I still have work to do,” he said, and turned back to the papers strewn across his desk. His jaw clenched and unclenched, like a nervous fist. “Hannah, please,” he said without looking up. “Go to bed.”
He’s frightened to death, I thought. He’s pretending to work so as to avoid visions of his own imprisonment and execution. And ours. I suddenly realized that it was a thing he had been doing for many months now. Possibly years. He knew that his life, and therefore ours, mine and my sons’, were precariously held. How stupid I’ve been! I thought. Too self-absorbed, too obsessed with my own memories, dreams, and reflections to see the danger that surrounded us. And for the first time, I, too, was frightened.
YET IN SPITE of my fear, or perhaps because of it, I kept inside my bubble and stayed deliberately detached, rigorously uninvolved, all the way through a series of cascading events, one falling hard upon the next, that threatened to crack the bubble open like an egg. These were events that no one, least of all I, could have anticipated. Charles Taylor did indeed form his People’s Progressive Party and called for a nationwide referendum to void the remaining two years of the president’s term. A week later, the Senate of Liberia unanimously passed an act specifically banning the party, and Charles, to avoid arrest and probable execution, fled the country. He was said to be the house-arrested guest of Libya’s President Ghaddafi, who refused to extradite him back to Liberia. It was a small favor, easily given, one that might someday elicit ample repayment—either from Tolbert, for having kept Charles under lock and key, or, if Tolbert fell, from Charles, for having refused to extradite him.
Back in Monrovia, everyone suspected that Tolbert had lost the support of the Americans. It was thought that the Americans had begun to mistrust the president’s engorged ego and greed and his increasing recklessness and were about to abandon their man in Africa, cutting him loose both of their restraints and of their protection. If you want a big dog, the Americans believed, you have to give him a long leash. But not too long. For a decade, William Tolbert, the president of Liberia, had been one of the Americans’ big dogs. Maybe now they were switching the leash to Charles Taylor. Maybe Charles would return in triumph from Libya and become the next president of Liberia.
It was a not-uncommon syndrome in Africa in those years, in which a puppet president gradually became a self-deluded despot who no longer remembered who was really in charge of his country. After years of feeding and lavishly housing the leader and his cronies, the citizens finally grow hungry and angry enough to riot in the streets. The leader calls out the army and brutally shuts down any and all opposition. Soon, however, the army, unpaid for months, becomes demoralized, and the officer corps gives evidence of increasing unreliability—a reluctance to follow orders passed down from the commander-in-chief, loud demands for back pay or, with national cash reserves having long since dried up and no cash money available, demands for increased emoluments and political payoffs and perks—un
til finally, with the leader no longer able to buy their loyalty, the officers come together and plot the leader’s overthrow and replace him with one of their own.
Around four o’clock of the afternoon of the coup, Woodrow telephoned and said he had to stay late at the ministry and might have to remain there overnight. “There’s a bit of a crisis over here,” he said with typical understatement. “And by the way, you’d better keep off the streets until tomorrow at least. There’ve been reports of a few rows between the army and the police out there. Nothing serious, you understand, but I’ll send Satterthwaite over, if you like,” he added.
“We weren’t going anywhere, anyhow. No need to send Satterthwaite. He’ll just want to hang around and read his comic books,” I said blandly, Satterthwaite having become my least favorite member of the household. The truth is, though Jeannine and I had grown somewhat more cautious in our movements through the city since the Rice Riot a year earlier, by the same token, because the anger of the rioters had not been directed against our home, we felt oddly, perhaps unrealistically, protected by our high wall and locked gate, our brave dogs, and our status.
“Stay as late as you like. We’ll be fine,” I said, not in the least curious as to the nature of the crisis at the ministry. About once a month, due to a “bit of a crisis” or an unexpected cabinet meeting or the sudden need to entertain a visiting foreign dignitary or corporate chieftain, Woodrow did not come home until dawn or midday the next day, arriving rumpled, exhausted, smelling of whiskey, cigar smoke, and cheap perfume. I never asked him where he’d been. I could guess easily enough, of course, but had no desire to confront him. By then I had come to welcome his shabbily contrived absences. I saw them as earning moral capital for me; moral debt for himself. We were drifting steadily apart, each of us in a different way, I thought, preparing for the inevitable split.
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