The night before I left, Sam Clement dropped by the house on his way home from the embassy, to wish me bon voyage, he said, and to reassure me that he’d keep an eye on my boys, including Woodrow (wink wink), until I got back, when in fact he was merely making sure that I knew that my departure from the country was under the protection and in the interests of official U.S. policy towards Liberia and the administration of President Doe.
Later, the president himself telephoned to say that he hoped I had a “superb” holiday in America and used the word superb, his new word of the week, I guessed, twice more, in reference to my sons and to characterize my company, which he said would be very much missed during the upcoming national holiday. As an expression of his personal affection for me, he was providing Woodrow with a bit of a cash bonus to help pay my travel expenses and would send it to me via Woodrow’s trusty assistant, Satterthwaite.
Woodrow, who left early for the ministry the next morning and did not see me off later, was clearly relieved to have me gone from his household—it was saving his life, after all—but had to say that he would miss me terribly. Then Satterthwaite arrived with the car around three that afternoon and handed me the packet given to him at the office by Woodrow. It contained my one-way ticket to JFK and an envelope with fifty crisp, one-hundred-dollar bills inside. Satterthwaite looked at the ground and said to me, “I hope you come back soon-soon, Miz Sundiata,” but I knew he was thinking, Damn good t’ing dis bitch finally outa here, ’cause someday her gonna get mad at de ol’ man an’ tell ’im what we done once way back den an’ mek de ol’ man fire me or wuss.
Jeannine stood woefully at the front gate as Satterthwaite drove me from the yard, tears running down her round, brown face, her fingers crossed in a behind-the-back hex designed to keep me from ever coming back, making the house hers, my children hers, my husband and his wealth and power hers.
No one else took account of my departure from Liberia that day. It happened so quickly, of course, that there was little occasion for a farewell party or visits with the half-dozen or so people in Monrovia whom I counted as friends. And they weren’t really friends, anyhow—merely acquaintances, the wives of Woodrow’s colleagues and business associates. Elizabeth and Benji, who had been running the lab on their own for the last seven years, were not my friends, though I knew them well and had seen them nearly every day on my visits with my dreamers. The university had not bothered to replace me after I left my post as clerk of the works and had withdrawn all but minimal support for the project, providing only enough funding to keep the chimps caged and alive. This was before AIDS research had gotten under way in earnest, when a new reason would arise to infect the animals with disease and monitor their reactions. If they’d been allowed to do it, the university officials would have had the animals put down, cheaper than releasing them to the wild and easier on the animals, most of whom had been traumatized by capture and confinement and had gone through a simian version of the Stockholm syndrome and had so thoroughly substituted their captors’ desires for their own that they were incapable of living naturally in the wild.
Early the morning of the day I left Monrovia, even before packing my bag, I went out to the lab, ostensibly to say goodbye to Elizabeth and Benji, but actually it was for a final visit with the chimps, for, without my ongoing vigilance, I did not think they would live long under their keepers’ care. The machinery that paid Elizabeth and Benji their monthly salaries was permanently in place, it seemed, and did not depend on there being any chimpanzees in those cages. Corruption thrives on process, not product, so it didn’t matter to them or anyone else if the chimps starved or sickened and died, if the cages one by one were emptied out, because Elizabeth and Benji would still be paid by the American university for maintaining its research facility and animal subjects in Liberia, and the university would still be paid by the multinational pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey, and the pharmaceutical company, through tax write-offs and federal grants, would still be paid by the American citizenry. Though I had come dangerously close to loving the product, the dreamers caged in a Quonset hut out at the edge of the city, I was merely a witness to the process, helpless to change it at any level.
I rode out on my bicycle, as had long been my habit, and as usual no one was at the lab. Elizabeth’s and Benji’s routines had long since been reduced to showing up twice a day for only as long as it took to feed the chimps and hose down the floor of the Quonset hut and conduct whatever little side business the two ran out of the all-but-defunct lab. They had sold off piecemeal most of the office furniture and the household goods and furnishings from the three cottages—after taking as much of it as they wanted for their own use—and were renting out the cottages on an hourly basis, I suspected, for I had on several occasions seen strangers, men with women, arriving and leaving at odd and unlikely hours. I never entered the cottages to see for myself who was living or working there—prostitutes, I assumed—and never confronted or quizzed Elizabeth or Benji about the use they were making of the compound.
They could strip it bare, for all I cared, or trash it or turn a profit from it any way they wanted. I had no loyalty to the university that financed the project and did not believe in the purposes for which the facility had been established in the first place. To me, it was a prison whose inmates had been deranged first by the circumstances of their capture and then by their lifelong confinement, inmates rendered incapable of functioning outside their cells, kept there now solely for their own safety. I made sure that they were properly fed and watered twice a day—either by Elizabeth and Benji or, if they didn’t show up, by me—and that their cages were washed down, and when on occasion one of the chimps injured itself or fell ill, I nursed it back to health, and, as happened several times over the years, if one of them died from an undiagnosed illness or simply from sadness, I buried the poor creature out behind the Quonset hut and erected a wooden marker with the dreamer’s name painted on it, Hooter and Livingston and Marcie. And grieved.
The dreamers had come to trust me, to welcome my twice-daily arrival with a joyful chorus of pant-hoots and hand-claps. We communed together, usually for an hour, sometimes more, in the mornings after my sons had been washed and fed at home and dressed for the day and placed in Jeannine’s care, and again in the late afternoon, when it had begun to cool and I did not mind riding my bike out to the compound and back, a thirty-minute ride each way that took me to the edge of the city and the beginning of the jungle. My time with the dreamers was the most peaceful, restorative two hours of the day for me, and I had quickly become dependent on the visits for what little peace of mind I had then. Without it, I feared I would come undone, for, despite the leisurely pace and apparent stability of my daily life as wife and mother, that life felt fragile, as if it were someone else’s and at any moment I would be exposed as a fraud, a counterfeit wife and mother, not at all who I seemed or claimed to be. And not anyone whom I knew, either. It was only when alone with the dreamers that I knew myself.
In those years, there were, as there is now, a large number of baby chimps being bought and sold illegally on the streets of Monrovia and in the marketplaces all over West Africa and many more babies being captured and smuggled out to labs in Europe and North America. I knew about this terrible trade, knew that to capture a single baby in the wild it was first necessary to shoot its mother and as many as three or four of the other adults who always tried to protect the baby from the human beings. Over the years, whenever I came upon one of the little wide-eyed, terrified creatures locked in a tiny cage or at the end of a chain in the market or alleyway, I purchased it myself, and after nursing it back to health, for the babies I bought were almost always malnourished and swarming with parasites, carried it out to the compound, where, with a terrible sadness, I imprisoned it with the others.
A baby chimp cannot survive alone in the forest, and I had no way of returning it to its lost and probably scattered and decimated family. The best I could do for it was provide a l
ess cruel form of imprisonment and deprivation than the one that would lead inevitably to an early death. Baby chimps are like young humans, playful and clever and eager to please, and they respond to kindness with delight and gratitude. But after a few years they become troublesome, hormone-fueled adolescents and then adults, very powerful, willful, and highly intelligent creatures for whom the human order of things is perceived as a challenge, a regime to be overthrown. An adult male chimpanzee can weigh as much as an adult male human and is five times as strong and capable of extreme violence against objects and other animals, including human animals and its fellow chimps. When a pet baby or even a laboratory chimp becomes an adult, unless it is caged, it is almost always executed, killed simply for being itself.
In purchasing the babies I came across in the marketplace and locking them into a prison, I was saving their lives. But for what? Every time I walked along the rows of cages and pushed melons, bananas, cucumbers, and armloads of greens through the bars or passed the food directly into the hand reaching through the bars towards me, every time I returned the direct, deep-water gaze of the dreamers in my charge, and every time we spoke together, they in their language, and I in mine, I asked myself, why can’t I set them free? Lord knows, I wanted to do it, and hundreds of times I imagined doing it, simply unlocking the cages and taking them by the hand—for all of them now let me hold hands with them, and we even groomed one another—I would lead them under cover of darkness to the edge of the forest and there let go of their hands and turn and walk alone back into the city.
But it was too late for that. They were like ruined children, incapable of surviving on their own. Humans and chimpanzees have to be taught by their kith and kin how to be a human or a chimpanzee, how to find proper food and shelter, how to relate to others of its species in ways that are mutually useful and satisfying, how to reproduce, how to care for the young and the old and infirm—or else we perish as a species. Every chimp in my care had been captured as a baby and had been confined for its entire life so far, and did not know, therefore, how to be itself. And I had made myself the warden of their prison, and by default had become their caretaker and had made them dependent on me for their food and shelter and protection from the humans who would as soon neglect them and let them starve and die in their own filth as sell the babies for pets and kill the adults and sell their bodies for meat, their hands and heads for souvenirs. And now I was about to abandon them.
They greeted me that morning with their usual clamor and applause and loud declarations of hunger and thirst, which I quickly satisfied. Neither Elizabeth nor Benji had shown up yet and possibly wouldn’t arrive till evening, if at all, but I had arranged with Woodrow to have our yardman, Kuyo, who had developed an affection for the chimps, replace me as caretaker. Woodrow promised me that he would see to this, but I carried his promise to Kuyo myself, to impress upon him the seriousness of the job. Starting this very evening, I told him, his job as yardman would include purchasing the chimps’ food in the marketplace once a week and feeding them and washing down the floor of the Quonset hut twice daily. Woodrow’s office paid for the food from the general fund supplied by the grant from NYU, the same fund that paid Elizabeth’s and Benji’s salaries every month. Kuyo said he’d like that. “The monkeys-dem, we come to be friends now for a long-long time.” I felt, therefore, replaceable in the lives of my dreamers. But were they replaceable in mine? I wasn’t sure. Everyone else in my life, even my children, saw me as replaceable. Somehow I felt that in my sons’ eyes, just as in Woodrow’s, I had become extraneous to their lives, merely a witness, a sympathetic bystander. To Jeannine I was a pretender to the throne. To everyone in Liberia who knew me I was Woodrow Sundiata’s white American wife. I was a woman whose absence would barely be noticed.
Except by the dreamers. When I was no longer there mornings and afternoons with armloads of food and plenty of fresh water and kindly murmurings and filial touches on the hand and arm, they would know I had left them. And they would miss my pale shadow on the far side of the bars greeting their dark shadows, my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves, revealing to me and to them the face of our ancient, common ancestral mother, caught and given shape here and now in her descendants’ mirrored gaze. The dreamers and I took each other out of the specificity of personal time and physiognomy. When in their presence I was in sacred time and space, and they were, too. I was convinced of it.
I know how this probably sounds to you, but I don’t care. Any more than a born-again Christian cares what she sounds like when she tells an atheist of her personal relationship with an itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. There are parallels between my meetings with the chimpanzees and the Christian’s encounter with Christ. When I first saw the dreamers, like a Christian touched by her savior, I wept uncontrollably. Later, through the daily rituals associated with caring for them, like any steadfast acolyte, I gradually got myself close enough to see them for what they truly were, a gate that led me straight to that ancestral mother. The spirit of the river, the one they call Mammi Watta.
I tell you this even though I know you might think it little more than spiritual bilge, a weird form of New-Age hogwash, because I’ve come to trust your kind patience and open-mindedness. I’m not a conventionally religious woman. I’m not religious at all. But until the dreamers entered my life, I was locked into a material world whose only exit lay in an imagined future, a utopian fantasy. Until I met the dreamers, I was stuck with a mere ideology of exit.
Slowly I walked from cage to cage, as if passing along the stations of the cross, with my head slightly bowed, my teeth carefully covered, hands loose at my sides, and the dreamers quieted one by one and silently watched me, babies and adults alike. I said to them in a low murmur, I’m leaving you today and do not know when I will return. And I pray that this is a riskier, more worrisome thing for me than it will be for you. And I pray that in my absence neither of us will fall back to being what we were before. That we not become imprisoned isolates. That we not become monads. That we not become as we were, motherless brothers and sisters unable to recognize one another as kin. I passed along the cages, and when I returned to my starting point, repeated my slow walk and said the prayer again, and did it a third time, making of it a ritual act. And then I bowed my head and backed slowly out of the building into the glare of sunlight and closed and locked the heavy door behind me.
Chapter III
THE SIGHT OF SO MANY white people rushing to get through passport control and customs at JFK nearly sent me running back to the plane. I had not seen a majority of white people gathered together in one place in nearly ten years. There were some blacks in the crowd, of course, men wearing safari jackets, guayabera shirts, or dashikis, women in long, colorful wraps—my fellow travelers from Africa. Another cluster of weary, well-dressed families whose very foreignness made them look comfortably familiar to me had come off a flight from Delhi. Most of the white people, me included, wore jeans and sneakers and tee shirts, summer travel apparel for European tourists in the States and Americans returning from abroad. Many of them, as did I, wore small, papoose-sized backpacks. They were my people, members of my tribe.
But the whites didn’t look quite human to me. Their faces were all the shades of an English rose garden, from chalk to lemon yellow to pink to scarlet, and their noses and ears were too large for their heads, their hair was lank and hung slackly down and, where it wasn’t held in place by a cap or hat, seemed about to slip off their skulls and fall to the floor. They looked dangerous, so self-assured and knowing, so intent and entitled, as they rushed to stand in neat rows and handed their passports to the uniformed officers waiting in booths like bored ticket takers at an amusement park.
When my turn came, before presenting my passport, I opened and glanced into it, half expecting to see the
re a photograph of a black woman—someone who did not resemble these white people—and surprised myself with the face of a woman named Dawn Carrington, who did indeed resemble the white people. The officer, a gaunt man in his forties with strands of thinning black hair combed sideways over the top, took the passport and examined the photograph carefully and matched it with my face. He breathed through his mouth as if suffering from a cold. He flipped the blank pages, then paused over the page that had been stamped years earlier, first in Accra and when I came over to Liberia. He cleared a clot of phlegm from his throat and said, “You’ve been away for quite some time.”
“Yes. I was married there,” I said. “To an African.”
“And your husband? Is your husband traveling with you, Mrs…?” he looked again at my photo. “Carrington.”
“No.”
“I see.” He hovered over the information for a second, then pursed his lips as if about to whistle. “So you reside in Liberia, then?”
“Yes. I have… I have children born there.”
“I see. How many?”
“Three. Three sons.”
“I see.” Another long pause. He gazed over the heads of the swelling crowd and into the distance. “How long will you be away from your husband and children, then?”
“I’m not sure. Not long. I’m here to visit my parents,” I quickly added, surprised to hear it said like that, so frankly and easily. Surprised to find myself telling him the truth.
“I see.” He handed the passport back and stared at me for a second, as if he knew me from a distant past, and I returned his stare, as if he did not. He twitched his narrow, red nose, wrapped it in a hanky and blew. “Well, welcome home, Missus Carrington,” he said and blew again.
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