Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  After an awkward pause during which I groped in vain for the right words, I finally managed to come up with a self-conscious “How do you do, sir?” which was not at all what I had intended to say. Somehow, I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were both disappointed by our first encounter.

  But my discomfort was far from over. I had yet to decide how to address the man to whom I owed my existence, and who, until a few minutes ago, had been an absolute stranger to me. The German Vati (Daddy), which is what I had called him when I was a little boy, sounded too foreign in an English-speaking country and inappropriately affectionate. Father seemed too formal, while Dad didn’t seem formal enough. For the time being, I decided to wing it and avoid addressing my father until I came up with a better idea.

  While I said goodbye to my Danish friends, my father and Captain Hartmann went to the captain’s stateroom to take care of business. The transaction, I had been told, involved the Bornholm’s temporary hiring of more than twenty African dockworkers through my father’s steamship agency.

  When my father returned from the captain’s quarters, his face registered annoyance. In his hand I saw the cardboard sign I had left on my cabin door. “What have you done?” my father demanded in an agitated voice. “The captain told me that you were extremely rude to him and warned me that I would have my hands full with you.”

  So that was it. Captain Hartmann, in his childish need for revenge, had bad-mouthed me to my father and thereby made an already difficult reunion even more difficult. Rather than letting my father discover for himself what kind of person I was, he compromised our relationship before it had even begun.

  While I groped for some kind of explanation, my father cut me off. “We’ll talk about it some other time,” he said ominously.

  FAMILY REUNION IN MONROVIA

  As the rowboat took us back to shore, my father’s anger seemed to have evaporated. With obvious pride, he pointed out various gleaming white government buildings in the distance that dotted the hilly landscape of Monrovia, including the U.S. Embassy at Mamba Point. On shore we were met by a young, barefoot man in khaki shorts and shirt whom my father introduced to me as his “houseboy” Jason. “This is my son, Mr. Hans,” my father told Jason.

  “Pleased to meet you, Meesta Haans,” said Jason with a deferential nod, then grabbed my suitcase and led the way. The house, my father explained, was located on the same street just a short distance away.

  The street was teeming with people, some dressed in African garb while others wore Western-style clothes. Most of the buildings were ramshackle structures of cinder-block walls with corrugated iron sheet roofs. What struck me most about the people was that they seemed to be an unusually jovial lot, happily laughing, slapping each other’s backs and pumping hands. All along the street, rows of squatting women in colorful dresses were offering a vast variety of wares that ranged from hand-woven “country cloth” to freshly baked bread. They were engaged in loud chatter in their native languages that at first sounded to me like arguments, but that I later learned was just normal talk. Some of the women, wrapped tightly in colorful lapas that revealed their curvaceous bodies, sauntered along at a leisurely pace while balancing all types of objects on their heads, from boxes to buckets to sewing machines, all the while chatting up a storm. Some women, I noticed, carried sleeping babies strapped to their backs.

  “This is it,” my father announced, pointing at a large, rather plain, two-story stucco house on the side of the road. “The first floor holds my office and garage and upstairs are the living quarters.”

  Then he instructed Jason to show me to my room before getting my bath ready. “When you have cleaned up and rested a bit, we can have some chop,” my father suggested, explaining that chop was Liberian slang for food. “Let Jason know when you are ready. I’ll be in my office.”

  My room was large and cheerfully bright. It was dominated by a huge bed that was covered by a mosquito net whose apex was attached to the ceiling. A large ceiling fan kept the air in motion, but not enough to provide an escape from the stifling heat.

  “Your bath is ready, Meesta Haans,” Jason announced.

  “Thank you, Jason. How long have you been working for my father?”

  “Four years, sah,” Jason replied.

  I was soon to discover that the term houseboy did not begin to describe the myriad of functions Jason performed with the greatest aplomb and efficiency. A true factotum, he was also my father’s chauffeur, his auto mechanic, his messenger, his launderer, his valet, his appointment secretary, his finder of lost or misplaced objects, and his memorizer of important facts. After getting to know Jason, I became convinced that had he had just a few years more than his three years of missionary schooling, he would easily have been able to run my father’s steamship agency.

  Refreshed by a lukewarm bath, I put on the freshly laundered white shirt and slacks Jason had laid out for me and, on his direction, went to the large living room where a long table was set for two. Soon I was joined by my father, who told me that he was closing his office early in honor of my arrival.

  Jason had placed a huge, cloth-covered tray in front of me that contained several delicious-looking dishes, including chicken in gravy, collard greens, plantains, and mountains of rice. A few seconds later, I experienced my first visceral culture shock. I had a monstrous appetite, having forgone breakfast on the Bornholm, and so I swallowed with great relish a mouthful of chicken and gravy. All of a sudden, my mouth and throat turned into a fiery inferno that had me coughing and gasping for breath. “I guess you’re not used to pepper,” my father chuckled after I had recovered my breath and composure. “For a moment I had forgotten that my son is a European and not an African. But don’t worry. I’ll have some more chicken prepared for you in no time, this time without pepper.” He then instructed Jason to tell Maima, the cook, to hurry up and fix some pepperless chicken. “Tell her that I want to see her cousin, the one who used to cook for the Americans.”

  My father explained that he intended to solve my problem by hiring a male cook who had been working for American missionaries and, as a result, knew how to cook nonspicy dishes.

  While I waited for my food, I watched my father turn his attention to a second tray that Jason had put before him. It was filled with unfamiliar African dishes, some of which smelled fishy and exceedingly unappetizing to me. Pointing toward a puddinglike dish that gave off a pungent, unpleasant odor, my father told me that this was an African delicacy called fufu. It was made from fermenting starch extracted from cassava roots, he explained. He ladled a liberal helping of a dark-green, okra-based sauce over it that followed the spoon from plate to mouth in slimy strings. “This we call palaver sauce,” he explained. “It’s called that because once you get it on your clothes, you’re in for a lot of ‘palaver’—arguments and trouble—with your woman since the stains are difficult to come out.” He followed his explanation with a hearty laugh.

  It suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time I had heard my father laugh. It made me quite happy to discover that there was another, less formal side to him.

  Taking advantage of what I thought was a propitious moment, I expressed my concern over the run-in with the captain. Once I assured him that I had not meant any disrespect, my father told me to forget it and promised me that he would too.

  He told me that, first thing the following morning, I was to see his personal physician, Dr. Jean Baptist Titus, head of Liberia’s Department of Health, for a complete checkup and instructions on how to avoid catching any of the many tropical diseases, especially malaria. He then cautioned me to never sleep without a mosquito net. “I wish I had heeded that same advice when I came back from Europe almost twenty years ago,” he said, “because the malaria I caught at that time still flares up occasionally and puts me out of commission for several days.”

  While I was finally enjoying my pepper-free chicken, a young, slender man with striking, chiseled dark features entered. “How are you doing,
Brother Lahai?” he greeted my father, using another version of my father’s first name, “and how is my little nephew?” He turned to me with a big grin, mockingly adding, “My, have you grown!”

  I realized that this must be Fritz, my father’s baby brother and, although six months my junior, my uncle, whom I hadn’t seen since he and I were barely past the toddler stage in Hamburg’s Johnsallee. Fritz welcomed me to Monrovia, telling me that his sisters, Fasia and Fatima, and brother, Arthur, couldn’t wait to meet me. “I’ll be back tomorrow after you’ve had some rest to take you to meet them and to show you around Monrovia,” Fritz promised.

  After Fritz had left, my father elaborated on the “family palaver” with some of his siblings, especially sister Fatima and brother Nat, to which he had alluded in his letter. When “the old man” (Consul-General Momolu Massaquoi) was running unsuccessfully for president, my father explained, he mortgaged his sizable properties to finance his campaign. When he died in 1938, he had left only debts behind, which, after years of hard work, my father said he had been able to pay off. “Now Fatima and Nat feel that a share of the redeemed properties belongs to them,” my father complained. “They don’t want to understand that our father didn’t leave us anything but debts. They’ve been wasting a lot of their money on lawyers in order to force me to share with them what is mine. But each time we go to court and I plead my case, the judge sides with me.”

  My father told me that, although he and Fatima hadn’t been on speaking terms, he had no objections to my visiting her. “I put no restriction on with whom you can associate,” he assured me, “with one exception. There’s a fellow by the name of Morris. He has told everybody that he is my son. Well, he is lying. He is no good. He’ll probably approach you and tell you he’s your brother. I don’t want you to have anything whatsoever to do with him. If you ever decide to make common cause with that rascal, you are on your own, because I won’t have anything more to do with you.”

  In spite of his rather harsh terms, I anticipated no problem living up to my father’s condition and assured him that, as far as I was concerned, Morris didn’t exist. But my father’s strange demand had aroused my curiosity. “Besides claiming to be your son and being no good, what kind of a guy is this Morris fellow?”

  Although obviously uncomfortable with the subject, my father told me a story that made me regard Morris in quite a different light. “If Morris weren’t such a screwball, he could have been one of the most powerful men in Liberia today,” my father said. “One thing I have to give to him, though, he has more guts than he has sense.” He then explained that a couple of years ago, Morris had landed a job as a heavy-equipment operator on the construction site of Monrovia’s harbor. When the native workers grew dissatisfied with their meager wages and grueling working conditions, they went on strike and marched en masse to the Executive Mansion to demonstrate. Worried about the prospect of social unrest and the impact of the strike on the scheduled completion date of his pet harbor project, President Tubman asked the workers to send him a representative to state their grievances. None of the workers had the courage to face the president, my father said, except Morris. “Here comes this little runt of a fellow and tells the president that he and his fellow workers won’t go back to their jobs unless they get a substantial pay raise along with shorter work hours,” my father recalled. After the president promised to meet their demands, Morris persuaded the workers to return to their jobs. From then on, my father recalled, Morris was “riding high” in his chauffeured government-supplied jeep and with a government-supplied office at the port as the official representative of the workers. Had Morris taken care of business, my father said, he could have become powerful as the first organizer of a Liberian labor union. Instead, Morris “acted the fool,” with nothing on his mind but chasing after women. Rather than tending to the concerns of his fellow workers, my father said, he showed up at his job only when he felt like it. One day, when on a rare occasion he did go to his office, according to my father, a delegation of workers informed Morris that he had been replaced as their spokesman. “To my knowledge,” my father concluded, “he hasn’t had a job since.”

  I realized that my father’s account of Morris’s fifteen minutes of fame was intended to turn me against him, but it did just the opposite. I was immensely impressed with the courage it must have taken Morris, at age twenty-six, to stand up to the most powerful man in the country.

  The following morning, after another lengthy breakfast chat with my father, I went to see Dr. Titus, a handsome, middle-aged Haitian. He told me that we were soon to be related, for he was all set to marry a cousin of mine, Emma Shannon, daughter of Supreme Court Justice Eugene Shannon, who everyone in Monrovia knew was Momolu’s illegitimate son. After giving me a complete physical, he advised how best to survive in the tropics and prescribed a daily dosage of atabrine antimalaria pills, which were more effective than the old quinine pills.

  That evening, my father took me for a ride through Monrovia. After we made the rounds of several nightspots where he introduced me to some of his male and female friends, I told him that I was beginning to see a big problem.

  “What kind of problem?” he asked solicitously.

  Reluctantly I told him that I hadn’t seen a single woman in Liberia who appealed to me. “How can I live in a country that doesn’t have any women I like?”

  My father laughed when he heard that. “If that’s all that’s bothering you, forget it,” he counseled. “I felt exactly the same way when I first arrived in Germany.” None of the women he saw looked beautiful to him, he said, but if I needed proof that he got over his “visual prejudice,” he suggested I take a look in the mirror. “After a few weeks, your perception, and with it your beauty standards, changes,” he assured me. “Just be patient.” It didn’t take me long to discover that, at least in this instance, Father knew best.

  Following our little man-to-man chat, we decided to call it a night. When my father got behind the wheel of his brand-new twelve-cylinder Lincoln sedan, he was approached on the driver’s side by a man. Without uttering a word, the man reached through the open window and slapped my father’s face. That was all I needed to see. Enraged by the unprovoked act, I jumped out of the car and confronted my father’s assailant. With a combination of well-aimed head punches that would have done me proud during my amateur boxing days, I knocked the attacker to the ground. “You’ve been messing with the wrong guy,” I heard myself growl. “The next time you feel like messing with my father, come mess with me.” Instead of trying to even the score after getting back on his feet, the assailant took flight as fast as his wobbly legs would carry him, then shouted obscenities from a safe distance.

  Although the incident lasted but a few minutes, it attracted a small crowd of curious onlookers. “Get in the car and let’s get out of here!” my father shouted.

  As we sped away, I felt proud of myself and glad I had an opportunity to demonstrate to my father my loyalty and readiness to face danger in his behalf. But instead of thanking—not to mention praising—me for coming to his defense, he berated me, telling me that I overreacted and that my action could cost him a lot of money if the fellow decided to sue. I was crushed.

  The following day, as he had promised, Fritz stopped by to pick me up for a reunion with Aunt Fatima and Aunt Fasia, both of whom were still living with Ma Rachel, Momolu’s widow and the Massaquoi matriarch. Aunt Fatima, who had recently returned from years of studies and teaching at Fisk University in Tennessee, was now a full professor at Monrovia’s College of Liberia, where she taught most of the sciences known to man. She had hardly changed since I last saw her in Germany shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Neither had Ma Rachel, who still looked the same except for a few extra pounds on her never-skinny frame and considerably more gray in her hair.

  Also on hand to welcome me was Arthur, my uncle and playmate from our childhood days on Johnsallee. Now Liberia’s influential and affluent director of mines and natural
resources, Arthur, a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, presented the biggest visual surprise to me. He had ballooned to over three hundred pounds. Also beyond recognition was my youngest aunt, Fasia. The tiny tot in diapers had grown into an attractive young lady of twenty. I met Uncle Abraham, a high official at the agriculture department and future head of Liberia’s Maritime Commission, which licenses a large portion of the world’s oil-tanker fleet.

  When all of my relatives had their turn hugging and welcoming me, Aunt Fatima announced that she had a surprise for me. Leaving the room momentarily, she returned leading a short, skinny young man by the hand. For a moment I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me as I looked into the rejuvenated face of my father. “This is your brother Morris,” Aunt Fatima announced, “and this, Morris, is your brother Hans.” As we shook hands, I took a closer look at Morris. In spite of what my father had told me, there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that this fellow who walked and talked like my father and who had my father’s face was indeed his son and my brother. Consequently, I knew what my attitude toward Morris should be.

  “Do you know that on account of you I almost landed in jail?” Morris wanted to know. He explained that the previous night he had been aroused from sleep by police. They ordered him to get dressed and took him to the police station, where they confronted him with a man with a bloody mouth, who had complained that the son of Al-Haj Massaquoi had knocked out one of his teeth. “That’s not him,” the man told the officers after taking one look at Morris. “The one who did it was taller and lighter; he looked and talked like an American.”

  Morris said that all of a sudden it dawned on him that the man the police were looking for must be his brother from Germany. “I had heard that you had arrived in Monrovia,” Morris said, “but I didn’t let on that I knew who you were and where to find you.”