The Darling

by Russell Banks

  “Forget it, Zack.”

  “Just hear me out, man. I can’t do it alone, I’m an ex-con and still on parole and can’t get inside to talk to Charles personally and privately. You know, to coordinate things. But you can, Miss Dawn Carrington. Or Musgrave. Or Sundiata. Whoever you are these days. I assume you still know how to cook up a phony passport that would get Charles out of the States.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. I can. But tell me why I should do this, Zack. It’s high risk. And for what?”

  “For the dough. But also because this guy is the real thing, babe. A Third-World freedom fighter. And he’s got plans for your man, Doe. Big plans. And besides, seems to me you’ve got some interests back there in Liberia that would make you want to get Charles Taylor the hell out of an American prison and back in action in Africa. You’ve got to talk to this guy, man. He’s been through it. He’s the kind of revolutionary we were, only we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This cat is heavy. If we can help him get back to Africa, then he’ll be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, I’m telling you, man, with Charles Taylor in jail here and Samuel Doe in power over there, you may never see your husband and kids again.”

  “You don’t understand, Zack. Charles thinks Woodrow flipped him to save his own neck.”

  “Not true, babe! He told me Woodrow was cool. Actually, the way I read it, Charlie probably flipped Woodrow and feels bad about it. He didn’t say that exactly, but I got the picture. The bad guy in this is Doe. He’s the one your husband’s got to worry about.”

  “I can’t, Zack. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. With you and Carol, I mean. In New Bedford.”

  “Just talk to Charles, man. Go out and visit him in Plymouth. It’s real easy. The place is minimum security. All you’ll need is an ID, which you’ve got, and a home address. You can use this address. Just talk to the guy. Then decide. Okay?”

  I didn’t answer. Then, after a few seconds, I heard myself say, “Okay. I’ll talk to Charles. Once.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “No, it’s not, Zack,” I said and grabbed his empty coffee cup and overflowing ashtray. “You’re also asking me to wash your dirty dishes.”

  “Hey, no way, babe!” He took the cup and ashtray back. “Here, let me do that.”

  IT MAY SEEM STRANGE to you, but something about prisons, jails, cages comforts me. All my life I’ve run from confinement and tried to keep others, even animals, from being imprisoned. Yet whenever I come close to an actual place of confinement, whenever I’m physically in its proximity, something inside me clicks off and something else clicks on. Dread gets replaced by complacent, almost grateful acceptance. When with hundreds of other demonstrators I was arrested and jailed in Mississippi and Louisiana and later in Washington and Chicago and spent a night or two in a cell awaiting bail and quick release, while the others rattled their cages and chanted in continuing protest and sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Amazing Grace,” I sat quietly cross-legged on the floor in a corner of the cell and gave myself over to the logic and clarity of imprisonment, as if, having relinquished my physical freedom, I was somehow free in a new and more satisfying way. In later years, driving past the high, razor-wired walls of state or federal prisons or catching a passing glimpse of the barred windows of a county jail, after the first flush of fear and anxiety passed, a certain restfulness came over me, and an ease that was almost a longing took my mind. In zoos I gazed into the cages and pens with an edge of envy. When I cared for the chimps all those years, partly it was so that I could vicariously join them in their iron-barred boxes. It still goes on. Today, at my farm in Keene Valley, even though I’m ideologically committed to providing my livestock and birds, all my animals, with as much free range as possible, I confess that I regularly have to argue away a desire to set Anthea and the girls to work building fences, pens, and cages for them. The freedom of the dogs to roam the woods, to abandon the farm any time they wish and race through the forest in pursuit of deer, threatens me. Something low in me wants to lock them in the barn, keep them on leashes tied to the porch railing, or just keep the beasts locked inside the house.

  I know, of course, that it’s what I want done to me, not to my poor dogs. Not to my sheep and ducks and geese and my hens. Not to my dreamers. And not to Charles Taylor. Though when I visited him that day in federal prison in Plymouth, I did think, as I parked my mother’s car in the lot and saw the stately, brick, Victorian residence of the superintendent, the barracks that housed the security personnel, the neatly trimmed, sun-splashed lawns and spreading oak trees, and the sprawling complex of what looked like the dormitories of a small, slightly impoverished state college, and the high chain-link fence topped with strands of barbed wire that surrounded the prison, I did think, Charles must be very happy here.

  He was not happy. He was furious. Even before he sat down at the table in the visiting room, he was talking full speed, practically spitting the words in that loud, high-dramatic mode that West African men use in response to perceived insult and impersonal injustice taken personally. “This a bad t’ing they done t’ me, all of ’em! Doe, him an’ the U.S. gov’ment them, an’ your sweet li’l husband, Woodrow, too, especially him, Hannah!” He scraped his chair up to the table and glowered at me.

  “Dawn,” I said in a low voice. “Dawn Carrington.” The room was a low-ceilinged hall half the size of a high school cafeteria with a dozen square tables placed so as to be in plain view of a guard, who monitored the room from behind a desk on an elevated stage at the front. A row of food- and drink-vending machines were posted along one wall. Seated at several of the other tables a half-dozen inmates with their lawyers, wives, and girlfriends engaged in quiet conversation, domestic problems mixed with legal and financial strategies.

  “How’s that?” Charles lifted his eyebrows in puzzlement.

  “My name. It’s Dawn. Here.”

  “Oh, okay.” He smiled knowingly. “Okay by me. Who tol’ you where I was? Who sent you here?” He looked healthy and strong, as if he’d been lifting weights. He wore a tight, white tee shirt and loose-fitting dungarees and sneakers. I’d never seen him without a tailored suit and tie or the occasional pressed and starched guayabera shirt. Charles was strikingly handsome back then. His smooth, round face shone with health and vigor and self-confidence, and he looked like a professional athlete. His hair was cut tight to his skull like a glistening black cap, and his skin was the color of polished old mahogany.

  “Zack Procter said you might like to see me.”

  Charles smiled broadly. “Oh, yeah. Zack.” He laughed. “Zack! When he tol’ me all about you, I didn’ believe the man at first. But then I put two an’ two together an’ come out four.” He paused and examined my face as if looking for a scar. “You always been a mystery woman to me, y’ know. Especially bein’ married to Woodrow an’ all. It always seem t’ me you could be fryin’ bigger fish, if you know what I mean. Your man Zack, he thinks he a big-time freedom fighter an’ all that,” he said and laughed. “What about you? You a freedom fighter too? Dawn. What your last name now?”

  “Carrington. Actually, no, I’m not. Not anymore.”

  “What are you, then? Who are you?” He laughed again.

  “Good question,” I said and laughed with him. I liked Charles and for a long time had been sexually attracted to him. His large, open face and intelligent eyes, his easy smile, his immense physical energy pleased and relaxed me and, for the moment at least, distracted me from the confused jumble of my emotions. Grief, guilt, fear, and anger: different feelings aimed at different people. Grief over my father’s death; guilt for having abandoned my children and now my mother, too; fear of being arrested and sent to jail; and anger at Woodrow and Samuel Doe for sending me out of the country. Yet, at the same time, in a brand new way, I was grateful to them all: to my father for having let me see him diminished and dying, a mere mortal at last; to my children and my mother, who I had to say were probably better off wi
thout me; to the FBI who, with their warrant for my arrest, had driven me back underground, returning me to Zack and Carol, giving me the chance now to conduct an operation that might redeem me for long years of political passivity and cowardice. I was grateful even to Woodrow and Samuel Doe for breaking me out of my Liberian cocoon. Charles distracted me from that muddle of emotions, he energized me, creating for me a context that for the first time in many years let me feel like a woman of principle. A woman capable of acting on her principles.

  I said to him, “Zack says you have a plan.”

  “Of course I have a plan! I always have a plan. Ever since the day that monkey Doe stole my country an’ now has stole everyt’ing in it I’ve had a plan. Why you t’ink that monkey an’ his CIA friends put me in this cage? They scairt of me, y’ know. An’ for good reason. I got friends in high places all over Africa who would like nothin’ better than to see that monkey’s head on a stick an’ the Americans gone home an’ the people of Liberia rulin’ themselves for the first time in history.” On the day of Doe’s coup, he said, he’d decided to overthrow him by any means necessary and give the country back to the people. All the people, he emphasized, not to the Americos and their white American overseers who had run it like their plantation for a hundred and fifty years. And not to the Russians and the Chinese either. He would establish a socialist democracy, he said, the kind of localized, tribe-based socialism that lay at the heart of every African tradition. Speaking rapidly and building steam as he went on, Charles declared that, if given a chance, this could be accomplished in Liberia, he was sure of it. Because of Liberia’s peculiar history, it could happen. Even though he knew that similar attempts to create a democratic socialist “third way” had failed elsewhere; in Kenya and Ghana and Jamaica and Cuba and Chile, they had failed because the U.S. and other capitalist countries had sabotaged leftist governments and leaders even before they’d had a chance to consolidate their power. I had never heard Charles or any other Liberian talk this way before. The only people I had ever heard say these things were white American intellectuals, fantasists, neo-Marxist theoreticians whose idea of Africa was based on the Black Power movement of the sixties and seventies and Stokely Carmichael in a dashiki and Huey Newton in leather and black beret posing with his automatic rifle in a high-backed bamboo chair. It took a decade for us to admit it, but the dream of a truly democratic socialist revolution in America or anywhere else in the so-called developed world had died shortly after 1969, probably in Chicago at the end of a police club in a cloud of tear gas. In small, mostly agrarian countries like Cuba and Vietnam, and for a while in Jamaica, the dream had lingered on a few years longer, before it got appropriated by strongmen and their party chieftains or undermined by coups and assassinations engineered by the old colonial powers. But as Charles continued to describe his vision of a Liberia that was free and democratic and economically self-sufficient, a small country quietly going about its own business of providing its own food and shelter and health care and education, trading its agricultural products with the rest of the world for the technology and manufactured goods it would require and no more than what it required—no luxury goods, he said, no Mercedes limos or Rolex watches, no private jets, nothing imported that did not advance the people as a whole—I began to believe that it could be done. It could happen, and very possibly Charles Taylor was the man who could make it happen.

  He asked me if I had some cash on me.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  He pointed to the row of vending machines lined up like sentries along the wall. “I want a Coke,” he said.

  We got up from the table and walked to the cold-drink machine. “You do it,” he said and indicated a line painted on the floor a few feet out from the machine. “Can’t cross that line. You can, but not me. Don’t ask why,” he said. “Prisons is all about rules.”

  I bought us each a Coke. We returned to the table and he resumed talking. The guard at the front of the room occasionally looked up from the magazine he was reading to survey his charges, but otherwise we were unobserved, ignored, unheard, as Charles unfolded to me his grand plan, and I took it in and with reckless ease and alacrity believed in its feasibility and, by the end of our meeting, its necessity.

  Hearing this, you must think that I was unforgivably naive, that I had learned nothing about people or the world outside a university classroom, that I had been asleep for ten or more years, as if in my early twenties my mind and heart had been put into suspended animation. You must think that my slow, sheepish withdrawal from Weatherman and the Movement, where I had been positioned only at the margins anyhow, that my flight to Ghana with Zack, the years I lived in Liberia with Woodrow, bearing his children and raising them and taking care of Woodrow’s home for him, the years I spent being other people, had displaced, erased, obliterated the girl I had been in my early twenties. The idealistic girl who was passionate about justice, especially for people of color, the girl who was convinced that in the fight for justice her life and sacrifice would count for something. The girl who, in the interests of justice and equality for all people everywhere, was perfectly willing to break as many laws as seemed necessary. The girl who found moral clarity in the phrase by any means necessary.

  You would be right, of course, for that girl had indeed been replaced by another. But also wrong. Caught as I was that morning in a descending whirl of conflicting needs and desires, unable to grasp onto anything or anyone solid, with no plan of my own, no place or person or ideal to cleave to, suddenly there was Charles. And Charles seemed more solid and inescapably present and accounted for than anyone else in my life, more real to me than Zack or Carol or my mother, my children or my husband. And Charles had a plan, he wanted to break out of prison, make his way to Libya, raise a guerrilla army there and return to Liberia and overthrow Samuel Doe; and he had a place, Liberia, that I had come to know better than any other place; and he had a dream: to establish in his country and, as I was beginning to think of it, mine, a socialist democracy that could by its very existence renew the dream of my youth. At that moment, it was for me a way, perhaps the only way, not to descend into cynicism or despair. It was a way to avoid utter collapse, a total nervous breakdown, hospitalization, drugs, and (why not?) suicide. When I walked through the gates of the prison, passed the security checks, and entered the visitors’ hall and sat down at my assigned table to wait for Charles to arrive from his cell, I had not known this, I could not even have imagined it, but as soon as he sat down opposite me and began to talk, I knew that, wherever he led, I would follow.

  It would not be difficult for him to break out of here, he said. The inmates had considerable freedom of movement. He explained that the left field of the baseball field backed up to the section of the chain-link fence that was farthest from the watchtowers. The fence was ten feet high, with six strings of barbed wire at the top. Beyond the fence was a thicket of trees, and beyond the trees Route 1, the old coastal highway, which led south towards Cape Cod and north to Boston. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, beginning at ten o’clock, there was a baseball game between the two main cell blocks, A and B. Charles was the regular left fielder for the A team. There were always plenty of arguments and now and then a bench-clearing brawl that ended the game and got the players and the inmates watching the game sent back to their cells.

  Charles would arrange to have his team’s pitcher deliberately, flagrantly hit a batter and initiate a brawl, and while everyone, including the watchtower guards, was distracted, he would scale the fence. It would be at least half a day before his absence would even be noticed, he said. “They don’t check every cell till nine o’clock at night, an’ by then I be long gone.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’ll be on my way to Libya,” he said. “If you does your job right.” He wanted me to wait in a car out on Route 1, parked at the side of the road, headed north. He wanted Zack with me. “White woman alone with a black man attracts attention. Nobody notice
s a white couple with their black friend in the back seat.” I was to provide Charles with a U.S. passport, a thing Zack had told him I was skilled at forging, a small carryon suitcase and change of clothes, five hundred dollars in cash, and a plane ticket to Cairo. Once Charles got to Cairo, he’d simply present himself at the Libyan embassy, and the next day he’d be in Tripoli, a guest of Mohamar Ghaddafi. At a coastal training camp east of Tripoli, half a thousand armed Liberian fighters were waiting for him to arrive and take command. “In twelve months’ time, we’ll be back in Liberia. In eighteen months, we’ll be in Monrovia, an’ Samuel Doe will be a dead man.”

  I said, “I understand why you want me to help you. But why bring Zack in? Any white man would do, right? Zack’s only willing to do this for the money. Which he says you promised him. The money you and Woodrow stole from the people of Liberia,” I added.

  “Stole it from Samuel Doe, you mean. He the one stole it from the people. And now it’s circulatin’ back to ’em, since it’s gonna help pay for weapons an’ transport an’ such, whatever Ghaddafi don’t wanna give us. As for our friend Zack, the freedom fighter,” he said, smiling, “I tol’ him I’d turn the money over to him if he helped break me outa this place. But that was before you come around. So now, if I don’t use him in the breakout and he finds out before it’s done an’ I’m outa the country, he’ll be mad enough to screw us both up. Zack’s a main-chance man, y’ know? Very opportunistic.”

  “So you don’t intend to give him the money? Even if he helps you escape?”

  Charles looked at me as if I were stupid. “Hannah, please. That money belongs to the people of the Republic of Liberia.”