Destined to Witness

  The church ceremony ended just in time for Fritz, Morris, and me to catch the Independence Day parade along palm-fringed Broad Street. The street was lined with spectators, some of whom, Morris explained, had come from distant villages to witness the annual event. It reminded me of my childhood and my affinity for Nazi-style parades.

  The parade was led by an off-key military band, followed by a ragtag contingent of khaki-clad men with outmoded bolt-action rifles, each seemingly marching to the beat of another drummer than the one in their band. Only the saber-brandishing officers at the head of each platoon wore shoes and long pants with their ill-fitting, U.S. Army-style tunics. With undisguised pride, Morris told me that I was looking at the vaunted Liberian Frontier Force, the nation’s entire military might. I was tempted to voice an unflattering comparison with Nazi and Allied military parades, but thought better of it.

  The high point of the parade was a walk-by by President Tubman and his cabinet. In spite of the oppressive heat, the men were formally attired in black tailcoats, striped gray pants, and black top hats. In addition, they wore colorful silk sashes and were bedecked with decorations of glittering stones and metal, with the president being the most bedecked. Even on a formal occasion like the one at hand, the president refused to part with his beloved Havana cigar, which he held in his left hand as he waved to the cheering crowd with his right, while sending off large puffs of smoke.

  Immediately trailing the president were Vice President Clarence Simpson and Secretary of State Dennis, who, Fritz explained, were “the two most powerful men in Liberia after the president.” I recalled my father telling me that both men, like the president, were old chums of his and that Secretary Dennis had personally arranged for a Liberian passport to be issued to me and sent to Hamburg. I now understood what he meant when he told me about the advantages of being a big frog in a little pond, like Liberia, versus the other way around. With chums like these, my father had to be a pretty big frog.

  Before I returned home, I asked Morris whether he could help me find a job, since I was tired of loafing all day. Morris said he was “between jobs” and was looking for a job himself. “I’ve heard the Liberian Mining Company, a subsidiary of Republic Steel, is hiring people at their new installation in Brewerville,” he told me. “If you are interested, we can apply tomorrow.” I surely was interested and agreed to meet him the next day.

  That evening, after I left Fatima’s reception, I had to give my father a detailed account of the wedding—who was and who wasn’t there and what people had been talking about.

  “How did you like the parade?” he then wanted to know. Having been weaned on high-precision SS goose-stepping, I had to suppress a snide remark. But my father caught my look of condescension. “What are you looking all smug about?” he asked.

  “Well, if you really want to know,” I replied, bracing myself against an angry rebuttal, “I think your Frontier Force is a big joke.”

  Instead of getting angry, however, my father agreed with me. “I know those Frontier Force people are no soldiers,” he conceded. “They were recruited straight from the bush and never received any military training worth mentioning. The president knows that. Not only that, he wants to keep it that way.”

  Having been raised in a country where military might was the main yardstick of national worth and prestige, I failed to understand the president’s lack of military ambition until my father explained. Tubman, he said, who had seen many Latin-American leaders toppled by their generals and colonels, decided from the start of his administration that he would have the weakest military establishment of any regime—“people so incompetent and disorganized, they couldn’t overthrow their own grandmas.”

  That explanation made sense to me and I began to look at the shrewd president with renewed respect until another question occurred to me. “What would the president do if Liberia were to be attacked from the outside?” I wanted to know.

  “That’s a risk,” my father explained, “the president is more than willing to take, since the likelihood of such an attack by any of Liberia’s three neighbors, British Sierra Leone and French Ivory Coast and Guinea, is virtually nil. Tubman knows that the borders were guaranteed by both European powers as well as the United States and that he can depend on that.”

  BREWERVILLE

  The next morning, as soon as my father had gone down to his office, I met Morris outside the employment office of the Liberian Mining Company. After I had turned in my completed application, a blond Dutchman called me into his office. He was studying my application with great interest before telling me that on the basis of my German journeyman rating, he could offer me an excellent machinist’s job for ten dollars a day. I felt as if I had hit the jackpot. With that kind of money, I could easily support myself and even send money to my mother in Germany.

  After agreeing to start the following Monday, I was about to leave his office when he handed me my application and reminded me that I had neglected to indicate my nationality. “I’m Liberian,” I said.

  Suddenly, the Dutchman squirmed with embarrassment. Apologizing that he had acted too hastily, he said he thought I was an American citizen. “This is actually an American outfit. We have an agreement with the Liberian government that allows us to pay only so much to Liberian citizens. Because of your German background, I can make an exception and offer you five dollars a day at the very most.”

  I was devastated. Because of a crooked agreement the Liberian government made with foreign companies, I had to work for a fraction of the money I could have earned. But realizing that I wasn’t in a bargaining position, I accepted the job in spite of my misgivings.

  When I rejoined Morris, he told me gleefully that he had landed a three-dollar-a-day job as an auto mechanic, a trade he had picked up during the war while working in a GI motor pool. When he heard my story, with 20/20 hindsight, he told me that I should have lied about my nationality. He said that if foreign companies were allowed to pay higher wages, no Liberians would want to work for the slave wages paid by Liberian-owned rubber plantations and by the Liberian government. As a result, he explained, foreign companies like Firestone get away with paying only twenty-five cents a day to thousands of rubber tappers who broke their backs harvesting rubber for the American rubber millionaires.

  When I told my father that I had accepted a job in Brewerville and who would be going with me, he hit the ceiling. Ranting and raving about my “act of treason,” he reminded me of the Bornholm skipper’s prophecy. “Now I know what he was talking about,” he lamented. “After I send for you, and take you into my house and let you eat as if I had a meat factory, you make common cause with my enemies. That’s how you repay me.”

  I hadn’t realized that staying with my father for three months after he hadn’t spent a dime on me for nearly my entire life put me that much into his debt. Nevertheless, I tried to be conciliatory and apologized for disappointing him. I tried to state what I considered a reasonable case for getting a job—so that I wouldn’t have to ask him for every penny I needed in order to buy a tube of toothpaste or go to the movies, and to keep from being bored loafing all day.

  I might as well have spoken to the wall, for my father didn’t hear a thing I said and repeatedly accused me of betraying him.

  Since Morris and I didn’t have any transportation, we gladly accepted when Charles Hanson, our friend from the U.S. Embassy, offered to give us a ride to Brewerville. On the morning Charles and Morris came to pick me up, I tried to tell my father goodbye, but he was nowhere to be found. Jason confided that “Meester” had left early that morning in his car without telling anyone where he was going or when he would be back. So I left a brief note, telling him in effect that I was sorry that my taking a job was so upsetting to him, but that I couldn’t stop being my own man just because I had come to Africa. I ended the letter on a conciliatory note, “I shall miss our morning chats. Take care of yourself. Love, your son Hans.”

  Since Charles had decided to tra
vel the primitive bush route instead of the newly completed highway, he was driving one of the embassy jeeps rather than a sedan. As soon as Charles pulled away from my father’s house, I felt as if I had been released from prison. I realized that what I had been missing was my freedom and that I had been afraid of my father, who had dominated me as if I were his property. I decided then and there never again to put myself in that predicament.

  For the time being, I decided to give my adventurous nature full rein and make the best of a bad situation. My friends in Hamburg, especially Fred Gass, should see me now, I thought, as, khaki-clad and sun-helmeted, we three adventurers careened along the bumpy path, far from any discernible signs of civilization.

  When I wanted to know what our chances were to encounter some lions or other local fauna, Morris told me that our chances were better than good of meeting up with a “bush cow”—Liberia’s most ferocious buffalo. Just as I expressed skepticism regarding his monster cows, my brother told Charles to stop the jeep. “Take a look,” Morris invited, pointing to the ground. What I saw made a believer out of me in a hurry. “Let’s get out of here,” I shouted after looking at the gigantic footprints and similarly gigantic droppings of what unmistakably was some kind of bovine animal.

  Eventually, the winding road came to an end at the bank of a broad river. “This is it,” announced Morris. “This is as far as we can go by jeep. Brewerville is just a short ways upstream on the other side.”

  “How do we get across?” I wondered.

  “Not to worry,” assured Morris. With that, he let out a piercing yell that sent flocks of colorful birds shrieking into the sky and monkeys and other creatures scrambling for safer perches in the trees. Before long a canoe with two villagers approached and pulled alongside the shore. After handing our few belongings to the two men, we thanked Charles for the ride and boarded the canoe.

  “Watch out for bush cows!” I hollered at Charles, who was waving at us from the shore until we turned at a crook in the river and he disappeared from sight.

  Except for the splashing of the oars, the canoe cut silently through the water. Occasionally, we passed a small village of huts in which occupants went about their simple daily chores of cleaning, pounding corn kernels into flour, baking, cooking, washing, and child-rearing, exactly the way they had done for centuries. At each village, little children waved at us and we waved back at them.

  As we neared our point of disembarkation, I noticed a large, dark object floating in the river directly ahead. When I suggested to Morris that we might be headed for a capsized canoe, he grinned. “Some canoe,” he quipped.

  On closer inspection, the horrible truth dawned on me. What I had taken for a canoe some fifty feet in front of us turned out to be a large crocodile. My instincts told me to get the hell away from the beast that watched us lazily through two narrow slits under the lids of its bulging eyes. But instead, our canoe came to a dead stop. Morris whispered to me to be quiet and not to move. “Don’t worry,” Morris tried to reassure me on noticing my terror. “He won’t bother us as long as we don’t bother him.”

  Morris seemed to know what he was talking about, because “he” kept his distance and, after several more minutes of scrutinizing us closely, disappeared with an audible swoosh into the deep, murky water of the river, leaving behind a boat-size wake that made our flimsy canoe rock precariously.

  I was much relieved when our canoe ride ended and we continued the final leg of our journey on foot. Within a few minutes we reached the Liberian Mining Company office, where we were assigned our living quarters and told to report for work assignment the next day. Our new home away from home consisted of a room in a wooden barracks whose only amenities were two wooden bunks, two metal lockers, and a sink with running water we were warned not to drink. Too tired to give our miserable surroundings much thought, we sacked out immediately, despite the torrid heat and the swarms of mosquitoes that kept up a constant hum about us.

  The next morning, I was given an arc-welding job and Morris was assigned to the motor pool. At first I was a bit nervous, since I hadn’t welded for more than three years. But after a few sputtering attempts, my hand became steady, and before long I was putting down respectable-looking seams.

  Before I knew it, the first workday was over and Morris and I were back in our barren, inhospitable barracks. Just when I was about to get depressed over our shabby surroundings, Morris suggested that we forget about the squalor and check out the action in Brewerville’s only tavern. He didn’t have to twist my arm. The tavern was packed with people, mostly Liberian Mining Company workers like us and local women who, I surmised, were Brewerville’s equivalent of Hamburg’s waterfront queens. Some of the couples were dancing to the hillbilly tune, “Be Honest with Me, Girl,” that was blaring from a loudspeaker. Decidedly not a fan of that particular genre of music nor of the type of available females, I politely declined when one of the young women invited me to dance. “My baby brother’s just bashful,” explained Morris, who shared none of my misgivings and totally misinterpreted my lack of interest. While I stood on the sidelines nursing a can of beer, Morris grabbed the hand of the girl I had rejected and in no time was on the dance floor, proving that lack of dancing talent was no obstacle to having a ball.

  For the next week, the tavern became our regular and only diversion after work. We could either face the squalor of our barracks and go mad from boredom and the constant hum of mosquitoes or drown our misery with hillbilly music, beer, and the company of easy women. One night, after Morris and I turned in, I had a strange feeling of dizziness that I attributed to the long hours of welding in the heat and the possibility that I might have inhaled some of the toxic welding fumes. But when I awoke the next morning shaking uncontrollably with chills, I knew something was seriously wrong. When I told Morris how I felt, he touched my forehead and felt my pulse. “You have malaria, bro,” he announced with authority, “and I’ve got to get you out of here right away.” With that, he was out of the door and I heard him running toward the plant.

  He returned a few minutes later and said that he had made arrangements for us to catch a ride on a company truck that was leaving for Monrovia within the hour. After piling several blankets on me, he told me to lie still and leave everything to him. He also assured me that this time we would travel the highway route, which did not involve crossing a river by canoe and facing crocodiles.

  I slept through most of our journey and didn’t fully awaken until the truck stopped in front of my father’s house. After walking into the office, Morris returned with my father and Jason. I was wondering how my father would act now that I was back under his roof and depending on his hospitality, but I was much too sick to be bothered by the prospect of being at his mercy again. All I wanted was to be left alone and sleep. I remember Morris and Jason lifting me off the truck, carrying me upstairs, and, after changing me into my pajamas, putting me on my bed. “Take care, bro,” I heard Morris saying. “I’ll be seeing you soon.”

  The next thing I knew, Dr. Titus was examining me. “You’ve got a nasty case of malaria, son,” confirmed Dr. Titus. “But don’t worry. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.” Then, turning to my father, he said, “Make sure he drinks a lot of soda pop and regularly takes the medicine I’m leaving here.”

  As soon as the doctor left, my father let go with a barrage of recriminations. “Do you realize that if I wanted to, I could see to it that you’ll never receive a single letter from your mother again?” he snarled. It was a threat to punish me in the most cruel way his mind could conceive. Mercifully, my mind and ability to comprehend became numb and my father’s voice drifted away as I fell into a deep, delicious sleep.

  Jason was obliged to add nursing to his already full calendar. Whenever I awoke from my fitful sleep between bouts of chills—whether during the night or during the day—he was sitting by my bedside, dabbing my forehead with an ice-water-soaked towel or spoon-feeding me soup and making me drink soda pop and gall-bitter m
edicine.

  One time, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a scratching noise on the door. I asked Jason to go see what it was. Slowly the door opened a crack and I could make out a hand, then an arm. The long fingers of the hand were outstretched toward me as if about to grab me. But no person materialized. Instead, the arm grew longer and longer as the hand came closer. I had pressed myself against the headboard in order to escape the grasping fingers that seemed to reach for my throat. Just as they were about to touch me, I screamed, “Jason!”

  “You okay, Meester Haans?” I heard Jason’s quietly reassuring voice, and it dawned on me that my fever was playing tricks on me. A few seconds later, my father poked his head through the door, but withdrew abruptly when Jason told him that Meester Haans had a bad dream. As far as I could determine, it was the first time in several days that my father had checked on me, although I had been acutely aware of his oppressive presence through his many discourses with Jason and others beyond my bedroom door. Suddenly, I was hit by an absurd thought. The hand that had followed me in my delirium and had threatened to strangle me, I decided, was the hand of my father.

  Gradually, my fever subsided and the interludes during which I drifted away became fewer and shorter. I was still too weak to get out of bed, except for a few steps to the bathroom, but I was definitely past the critical stage of my illness. As a result, Jason stopped his round-the-clock bedside vigil and instead visited me only at intervals.