Lani scowled. “I grown now, Brother,” she said, still peering at Gartee so far away. “Time for allowing and forbidding and punishing’s long gone.” She turned to him, smiling sincerely now. “Now’s the time for acceptance. And happiness for what’s to be, and what already is.” Then she took off down the path, her gait light and swift at the thought of Gartee’s embrace.
“Lani, wait!” Nolan yelled after her, but it was already too late, she was gone. He wasn’t stupid; he had seen them together when they thought they were alone, could discern the meaning of the Bassa they spoke rapidly to conceal its meaning from his mother and the rest of the Congo peers she kept company with. He just never thought she would actually do it—give up everything to live like an animal in the bush with a savage. He wanted to tell her to fornicate with him if she must, but let him marry some other unfortunate beast. He knew, though, that she wouldn’t hear him, so the words had lodged in his throat for months now.
* * *
—
Lani lifted her skirts and walked as fast as her legs would take her. She couldn’t help it—when she was a minute’s walk from Gartee, she broke into a run to meet him.
“Aha!” he exclaimed, as she jumped up and wrapped her arms around him. “Little Swallow, you have found me at last.”
She laughed, delighted at the sound of his name for her from his mouth.
He spun her around. “And I couldn’t be happier.” He nestled his nose in her hair and breathed in its clean, flowery scent. She was fond of putting pepper flowers in her hair, and the smell of the small, white, star-shaped plants always rubbed off on her.
She pulled away and eyed him anxiously. “What did they say?”
He wanted to tease her, keep it from her a little longer to draw out this small moment of power he had over her, the power of knowing something she didn’t, something so important it would irrevocably change their lives forever. But taking in those huge, imploring eyes, he just couldn’t do it. “They said we should come immediately,” he said, smiling. “They said we shall be wed within the month.”
Lani squealed with delight and threw her arms around him all over again.
“What kind of woman is this?” his parents and elders would say if they saw them so brazen like this, but they were completely alone now, and so he didn’t care. He allowed himself to plant kisses all along her forehead, this forehead he had seen so many times and resented so often while they were growing up, but which he now loved as no other forehead he could imagine. Off in the distance, Nolan watched, shaking with anger, and then finally turned away to walk back to the house.
* * *
—
Yasmine and Nolan sat impatiently at the table in the dining room, waiting for Dechontee, their new house girl, to place the lunch of rice and cassava leaf in front of them. Wlojii, their house girl of many years, was leaving them to marry a young man in her village, so she had been training Dechontee faithfully these last few weeks. The twelve-year-old girl was not a quick study, however, and had a sullen disposition on top of it.
“I swear, this whole house ’bout to go to ruin,” Yasmine said to Nolan, seated across from her. “All the help got an opinion ’bout everything, and they in love with they laziness.”
Nolan sipped on his palm wine, half listening to his mother. He had heard the speech countless times before.
Dechontee finally shuffled out of the kitchen with the food. Once she had put the platter on the table, she carefully lifted the bowl of soup and brought it toward her mistress. Unfortunately, she moved a bit too abruptly, and some of it spilled over onto the finely stitched tablecloth that had come from Boston last month.
Yasmine slapped the girl’s hands, incensed. “Stupid wench!” she hissed. “You too much like the ape to learn simple thing!”
Like so many of these natives, Dechontee’s face registered no response to the words or the slap. “Sorry, Ma,” she said, as she worked to scoop up the spill with a rag from her lappa.
Yasmine frowned and then laughed ruefully.
Nolan raised an eyebrow, wondering exactly what his mother was thinking.
“No, I the one who sorry,” she told the girl. “Can’t get no good work from your kind no way.”
The girl picked up her platter and left the room as slowly as she had come in, apparently unaffected by Yasmine’s outburst.
“You could show the girl a little mercy, Ma,” Nolan said after she was gone. “Ain’t no way a body can learn what’s being screamed at.”
Yasmine eyed him coolly, then shrugged. “We both of us know they ain’t tryna learn from us anyway, son. Look at Gartee, all those years we tried so hard to teach him how to roast a goat proper, and look at this here mess.” She gestured down at the oily, lumpy brown soup in front of her. “And if he think he can just take my baby with him, back into the bush, I ain’t taught him nothing.”
Nolan took a large gulp of his wine. He couldn’t imagine the house without Lani in it; hated to think of himself alone here with the few help they had left, with his increasingly vitriolic mother.
“Sometimes, it feel like this whole country just a dream to me—and a bad one at that,” Yasmine said bitterly, pushing the bowls of food away. She pulled on a strand of curly gray hair that had somehow escaped her hand that morning and tucked it back into the tight bun at the top of her head. “Ain’t no way to make things go the way they oughta. Ain’t no way to make things right. We all just gotta make peace with what bits we given and let go how we thought things was gonna be.” She sighed, resting her hand, now flecked with liver spots, on her only living son’s shoulder.
Nolan glared at her. “You mean we gotta let Lani go away into the bush with that . . . boy?” He spit out the last word like spoiled meat. “That traitor?” He shook his head angrily. “I can’t believe she wants it.”
Yasmine peered at him carefully. “Wants what, honey?”
Nolan’s face was getting redder by the minute, puffed up by images of his sister committing foul acts with Gartee, probably for years, right under their noses. “Wants to soil her womanhood with that . . . savage,” he sneered. “Wants to live like a beast in them huts, mosquitoes and ants crawling all over them, no proper schooling for the chullins, Godless, hopeless. How could she want that, Ma? How could she possibly want that? You think he tricked her or something? Put one a them juju spells on her?”
Yasmine grimaced. She leaned her thin, wiry frame against his thick, muscled one and then led him into the sitting room. They sat down in chairs the best carpenter in Monrovia had made for them some years back, in exchange for a parcel of land Nolan obtained for him from a Bassa chief nearby. Nolan felt Yasmine looking into his eyes, the light brown eyes of the boy who had grown into such a fine, competent young man—a man she could count on for everything from planning new encampments, to organizing survey expeditions into the bush. Yes, Nolan knew he had grown into a man his father would be proud of. If she could take pride in nothing else she had accomplished in this wretched land, it was this.
“What I think,” she said slowly, “is that a woman’s heart be as open as the night sky, ’fore she learn better. And your sister one of those been born with the openest hearts of all. It why everyone love her so—highborn, lowborn, American, savage, and everything in between. It why she always seemed to know their pain and their joy.” She smiled, and Nolan imagined she was remembering something like the image that flashed in his own mind, one of Lani teaching the children in town their ABCs at the schoolhouse in the mornings, then walking down to two, sometimes three villages in the afternoons to do the same with the savage children. Sometimes he wondered where this beautiful, generous, trusting young woman had come from.
“You right that Gartee took advantage of that openness, that goodness your sister got.” Yasmine sighed. “But the truth is, she let him do it. And now she gonna hafta pay the price. She gonna hafta choose.”
* * *
—
Lani had walked with Gartee to the tiny room he shared with two small boys and their head carpenter and said good night, when she heard a door close on the floor above them. Then, footfalls across the floor, and waiting at the top of the stairs. She knew it was her mother, who she had thus far been able to avoid in their spacious grounds since Gartee had returned with the good news. But she could see that her time was up now, that her mother had decided they must talk. And once Yasmine Wright decided something, there was no turning away from it.
Lani shuffled down the hall to the foot of the stairs, dreading the unpleasantness that was about to unfold. Her mother, all sinews and hard lines as she finished her fifth decade, stood regally at the top of the staircase, her embroidered white robe wrapped around her like some kind of king’s coat. She had let her hair down, and Lani reflected that she should do it more often, as the gray and white ringlets that framed her face took away some of the harshness that seemed to have dug in deep since Big George died. Lani had been three then, but Nolan told her plenty of times how beautiful their mother had been before she lost two children in one year, before her dream of a new start for the family had ended so abruptly. Before she had come to succeed beyond their wildest dreams in the colony, farming and livestock operations overshadowing all others. She was even happy sometimes, ’fore they passed, Nolan had whispered to her once when he was a teenager and she a child. She couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t remember a time when she had seen her mother smile. And now, here she was, about to break her mother’s heart again. The worst part was, she couldn’t even seem to make herself feel bad about it, either. Her feelings for her mother had dulled so much through the years that she sometimes secretly wondered if she loved her at all.
“You marry that boy, that’s it. We all done,” Yasmine called down to her, piercing the quiet of the night. She never was one to bother with greetings. What use were they, when there was a point to be made? “Don’t you never come back to this house, you hear? And don’t you never expect nothing from me and Nolan. Be like you dead to us. In the end, you come here to be just another savage.”
Lani looked up at her mother and was grateful that she felt something, even though the feeling itself hurt. And the feeling was twofold: sorrow and pity. How sad her mother had become, how devoted to her hatred of those she blamed for the deaths of her beloved sons. Almost every family she knew had lost someone to the African fever or the constant battle for land and power and resources. In fact, many families like them had lost more than one. Lani supposed that her mother’s abiding grief wouldn’t allow her to see this truth: that her loss was not unique, that loss defined what it meant to be on this land.
“Mama,” she said softly. “I been dead to you for years.”
* * *
—
They set out before dawn the very next day, the sounds of the dark forest swirling in their eardrums like whispers. Lani packed three of her dresses, two shirts and skirts, a few handkerchiefs, two bars of soap, her three favorite novels that Nolan had managed to find for her, and the fine Sunday shoes her mother had bought from a British merchant some time ago into her suitcase. She had been to the village enough to know that she wouldn’t need much there, and what she didn’t bring, Gartee and his family would either make or provide. As for Gartee, he had only the small pouch he had always carried with him when he traveled from the house to Giakpee and back again, and a machete in his right hand. In all the years he had been with them, he had not brought one more thing into the house, careful as he was instructed to be around the Congo people. Of course, he now knew that he was leaving with the most valuable part of the house itself—his wife-to-be. When Gartee had realized what was happening to them, that he and Lani had somehow stumbled into a connection, a reservoir of feeling much larger than each of them, his first response had been terror. Terror at his lack of control of feelings or Lani’s. Terror at the prospect of bringing a white woman into his home, his family, and his line. But what made his gut clench in the wee hours of the night was the thought of how Yasmine would react. He had seen, firsthand, what the madame of the house was capable of doing in the name of preserving her Congo family and way of life. But the very idea of living life away from Lani, the curly-haired nymph who charmed whoever she encountered, the unabashedly sweet white woman whose Bassa had grown as clear as anyone’s in the village after all those years of conversing with him and the other house boys and girls out of the earshot of her mother—Gartee could not imagine it. So many times during their midnight trysts in a meadow with high grasses a half hour’s run from the house, he had told her that they had to end it, that it would never work, that her mother would force her to choose in the end: him or her family, and that this was no way for someone to live. And every time, she had watched him while he wrestled with what she knew he had to get out because he loved her, listening patiently, hands folded in her lap, eyes glistening. And then when he was done, anguished and alone in the decision, she reached out her hand and traced the outline of his jaw from his temple to his neck. His whole body woke up then, electrified, and he had no choice but to touch her. And he knew she was right: He had no choice but to love her. And Mrs. Wright, he knew, would have no choice but to hate him for it. Lani shrugged when he brought this up. People often mistook Lani for an ordinary woman when they met her, because of her reticence and good manners. But what they missed was her resolve, which could not be moved once it had settled. Gartee had seen Lani’s mother rail against her for seeking out to consort with “those savages” during the harvest festival, confiscate her beloved books in order to punish her for not agreeing to let various Congo men she found distasteful call on her. Lani always sat calmly while these storms raged before her, as if watching a play she had no real interest in. This, of course, seemed to enrage her mother more. So that in the end, no one could say who had the stronger will: Mrs. Wright or her tenaciously kind daughter.
Gartee took her hand now and squeezed it, a gesture that was so foreign to him and his people because it was seen as a sign of weakness to show such affection publicly to a woman. She would be his first wife, and he knew, somehow, that she would do well in the village, that she would never look back, because she felt like she never belonged in this sad Congo house anyway, that they would create their own family of beautiful, bright children.
“Time to go,” he said to her in Bassa, and she squared her shoulders and nodded.
He took her suitcase and started walking, and she followed behind him. It would be a long journey to Giakpee, but they would take it one day at a time and arrive there within a week, together.
They had only made it down the first turn of the path to the house when Nolan ran out, half dressed and wild, his right hand held fast in a fist.
Lani turned around, confused. In the end, her last living sibling had sided with their mother, as he always did. She wasn’t surprised but couldn’t help be disappointed.
“Take it,” Nolan said when he reached them, huffing and puffing from his exertions. “I buried it after Little George died, ’cause I knew he would want us to have it.” He opened his clenched right hand to reveal the small pouch with a brass clasp that some natives had given him not long before he died. The years had done their work, and the animal leather of the pouch was frayed and broken, the shine of the brass long gone. Yasmine had spoken of the trinket just a few times in Lani’s life, how her beloved son had been murdered by “the devil’s magic,” and how they had to watch the help and everything they brought into the house so carefully so that history would not repeat itself.
“What . . . ?” Lani’s voice died out before she finished the sentence because she didn’t know what she wanted to say. She had no memories of either of her older brothers, although they were central figures in family lore by now. Every time she heard the story of Little George’s passing in particular, however, she felt a deep and inexplicable grief that floo
ded her senses—like the violent remembrance of events she couldn’t have witnessed in the first place. She had never been able to explain why she felt so keenly the loss of someone she had only known as a baby.
Nolan looked back at the house fearfully. Then, he hugged his sister, crushing her small bones against his sturdy torso. Lani allowed herself to be hugged by him, although she did not hug him back. He pulled her away after a moment, held her at arm’s length to look at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice breaking. “So sorry,” he said, and this time he moved his eyes from Lani’s to Gartee’s, and all three of them knew that in that second at least, he was speaking to him too. Then he turned and began to walk back to the house, slowly, his head down.
There were so many things Lani wanted to say or do, but in the end she simply closed her fingers around the trinket and took her soon-to-be-husband’s other hand. He squeezed it, and then they took their first steps on the long journey home.
You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness.
—Thomas Sankara
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
April 6, 1980, Sinkor Area, Monrovia, Liberia
IT ONLY A DREAM!
Evelyn sat bolt upright in bed, clutching at the wet cotton sheets. Her chest was tight enough to constrict her breathing, and sweat burned her eyes. She wanted to scream, but it was the middle of the afternoon, and her mother was likely in the kitchen right off the hallway from her bedroom. So she closed her eyes and bit down on her bottom lip, until she felt the rush of salty blood on her tongue. Only then did the terror in her gut begin to subside, and the sound of gunfire ringing in her ears give way to the steady tick of the ancient clock in the foyer.
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