Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  ESCAPE

  I was still bedridden when I heard my father return from one of his occasional evenings on the town. But this time was different. He was accompanied by a female who was not a native Vai woman, the only kind he normally associated with. I could tell because, as the two walked up the steps and into the living room, he sounded uncharacteristically solicitous. “Can I offer you anything—perhaps some whiskey?” he asked. A female voice replied, “Whiskey and water would be lovely.”

  The woman spoke a cultured English that was neither Liberian nor American. Yet I could not place her rather appealing lilting accent. Finally, the woman gave me a clue when she told my father that she still felt a little homesick for Kingston. I surmised that she was one of a group of Jamaican immigrants who had recently arrived in Monrovia.

  At first I felt embarrassed to be eavesdropping on my father and tried hard not to listen to their conversation. But since my father didn’t make the slightest attempt to lower his voice, that became impossible. Eventually, I listened intently as the subject of my father’s conversation shifted to “that damn rascal son of mine who since he arrived from Germany hasn’t given me anything but trouble.” He then unleashed a tirade during which he described me in very unflattering terms, starting with my “near criminal behavior” aboard the Bornholm. “To top it all,” he concluded, “my son had the nerve to come back full of malaria and take advantage of my generosity when he was in need of food, shelter, and medical care.”

  By that time I had heard quite enough. This privileged life had become a private hell. My first impulse was to walk into the living room and tell my father that he could stop worrying about my being a burden to him, that I would leave in the morning, never to return. Trembling with rage and feelings of powerlessness, I decided on another course of action.

  After an hour or so the two finally wound up their “date” and my father prepared to drive the woman home. As soon as I heard his car pulling away from the house, I hastily got dressed, threw my few belongings into my suitcase, and rushed downstairs past Jason, who looked dumbfounded by my hasty departure but dared not question me. I told him not to worry about me and thanked him for all his help. My plan was to go to Aunt Fatima, who lived a few blocks away, and ask her to put me up for a while until I could make other arrangements. To avoid running into my returning father, and although it was pitch black outside, I climbed the rather steep, muddy hill behind my father’s house instead of taking the road. My knees were trembling, my heart was pounding, and I could literally feel sweat gushing out of my pores. I felt like fainting, but the fear that my father would catch me and somehow force me back drove me on. I knew that in my weakened condition I would have been unable to resist him. At one point I lost my grip on my suitcase and it slipped down the muddy hill, causing me to repeat part of my strenuous climb all over. It reminded me of the legendary King Sisyphus of Greek mythology, whom the gods condemned to push a huge rock to the top of a steep hill in Hades, only to have the rock slip from his grasp and roll back down the hill, forcing him to start his backbreaking labor over again. I recalled that Sisyphus, a former Mount Olympus insider, had offended the gods by cheating death, and wondered what I had done to suffer a similar fate.

  After what seemed to me one of the longest foot journeys I had ever undertaken, although I had walked no more than a few blocks, I arrived at Aunt Fatima’s house. Despite the late hour, she was still up taking care of her new baby daughter, named Püppchen (Little Doll) in memory of her years spent in Germany. Unable to utter a single coherent sentence, I was grateful when Aunt Fatima, after taking one look at my sweat-drenched clothes, my feverish appearance, and my suitcase, told me to go to bed and give her the details in the morning.

  Despite my exhaustion, it took me a long time before I was able to fall asleep. Each time I heard a car passing, I imagined it was my father looking for me. I knew I had hit him where it hurt him the most—his pride. Monrovia was a small community, and news of my having left him was bound to travel fast and raise a lot of questions.

  When I finally awoke the next day, it was past noon. I hadn’t felt so good in weeks. Remembering the last twenty-four hours, I felt buoyed and invigorated, both physically and mentally, as if I had tapped into a new source of energy. All at once I felt free again—free from the oppressive dominance of a father who, although he had never supported me as a child, couldn’t get it into his head that I was an adult with a mind of my own and long used to responsibility and independence.

  A few days later, when I was well on my way to recovery, Aunt Fatima convened an informal Massaquoi family council in her parlor to decide on a course of action. Fatima’s husband, a permanent outsider, was barred from the meeting, as he was from all Massaquoi family affairs. Uncle Nat, the architect of the family’s legal war against my father, made a special trip from Bundeway, on the Firestone plantation, where he was the reigning district judge. Also present were Uncle Abraham, a high-ranking agriculture department official, and my brother, Morris. All agreed with my decision to leave my father and confided, belatedly, that they were surprised that I had been able to live with him as long as I did.

  When I told them of my concern that my mother would be terribly worried once she learned that my father and I were on the outs, Uncle Abraham wrote her a detailed letter explaining that my decision to leave my father was inevitable since “Al-Haj is a man with whom nobody who has a mind of his own can get along” and that she shouldn’t worry about me since the rest of the Massaquoi family would look out for me. Then Aunt Fatima suggested that I write a letter to my father explaining why I found myself unable to continue living with him. Glad to get things off my chest, I composed a letter that spelled out my hopes and dreams when I arrived in Liberia and my disappointment when I realized that he was not the wonderful father my mother had kept alive in my memory during all those years. “If you wanted me to be reared as your unquestioningly obedient son,” I concluded, “you should have been there for me from the time I was a small child. Now, you are exactly twenty-two years too late.” Everybody thought the letter was right on the money.

  From the moment I moved in with Aunt Fatima, it was understood that the arrangement would be for only a few days, since the arrival of Püppchen had left her with little extra space. Anxious not to overstay my welcome, I accepted Morris’s offer to stay at his place.

  Little did I know that I was in for a gargantuan surprise. Morris’s casual admission that his place wasn’t much to look at was the understatement of the year. Located near the oceanfront on Camp Johnson Road, in a shantytown of clay buildings topped by corrugated metal roofs, the “place” was a one-room shack that had the audacity to boast a tiny porch with several wooden crates that, I surmised, served as patio furniture. The only window had a wooden shutter that could be placed in an open mode with the help of a wooden stick. There was no evidence of water, running or otherwise, or, for that matter, any indoor plumbing. To my mild amusement, I noticed that there was no dearth of reading material, since indoors the straw-mat walls were covered with several layers of newspapers that, on close inspection, proved several years old. The entire inventory of the room consisted of a mattress, which was covered by sheets and a GI blanket, and a battered kerosene lamp standing next to it on the concrete floor. When I asked about the dark little pellets that covered the bedsheets, the blanket, and the floor, Morris replied, rather succinctly, “Rat shit.”

  Morris’s shack made our basement refuge in bombed-out Hamburg look inviting. I had trouble concealing my shock at the squalid conditions in which my brother had been living and shuddered at the thought of having to call this hovel my home. But I decided not to sound too negative. Besides, I had long ago learned from my mother that “in a pinch, the devil eats flies.”

  He explained that he had inherited the shack from his Kru mother’s sister after she died a few years before, and that he only slept here “now and then.” Most of the people in the area were Kru, he said, while assuring me tha
t I would be as safe at night as if I were sleeping in Abraham’s lap. “I never lock this place and nobody has ever tried to rob or bother me. It’s just like with the rats—we all know and respect each other here.”

  I was not impressed by Morris’s liberal philosophy of peaceful coexistence, especially when it came to rats.

  After acquainting me with some of the shack’s conveniences, such as a nearby outhouse and a hand-operated water pump, Morris told me that I was welcome to use the place any time and as long as I had a need for it. “You may even bring visitors,” he added with a crooked grin.

  I couldn’t imagine how much pride I would have to lose to bring company to this dump, but thanked Morris for being there for me when I needed him.

  My first night in my new “home” was an adventure I would never forget. Since Morris had told me he hadn’t planned on coming home that night, I had intentionally arrived late in order to make my overnight stay as brief as possible. As soon as I got between the not-so-pristine sheets and blew out the kerosene lamp, all hell broke loose between the hollow straw walls. What seemed to be an army of hundreds of rats rushed above and around me in an endless chase that was punctuated by frantic squeals.

  Since sleep was out of the question, I lit the lamp. As if I had uttered a magic word, the racket stopped. The only reminder of the rodents’ presence was a cloud of droppings that drizzled from the ceiling. To keep the rats quiet, I decided to sleep with the lamp burning. Since I had no other alternative, I spent many a night in the company of my rodent neighbors, and eventually learned to ignore them entirely by adopting Morris’s philosophy, “If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.”

  UNCLE NAT

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to depend on Morris’s hospitality for long. Just as I was getting used to the rats, Uncle Nat showed up at Aunt Fatima’s house and invited both Morris and me to live with him for a while on the Firestone rubber plantation. Nat promised to use his influence to help us find jobs with Liberian International Airways, an American company that flew a small fleet of DC-3s out of Robertsfield adjacent to the plantation.

  It turned out that, unlike my uptight father, Uncle Nat was a lot of fun to live with. From the moment Morris and I moved into Nat’s spacious bungalow on the government compound in the middle of the rubber-tree-studded plantation, he treated us more like an older brother than an uncle. Since his wife, Julia, was staying in Monrovia with their little daughter, Maria, while awaiting the arrival of another baby, Nat, an otherwise devout Catholic, celebrated his temporary bachelorhood by bedding down a young lady from a nearby village. Extramarital shenanigans, I had discovered, were a time-honored custom among Liberian men. When Nat told Morris and me that he had no objections if we, too, entertained female company, we rose to the occasion and found two attractive women who helped keep our plantation life from becoming dull.

  Despite his deceptively jolly private demeanor, there was another, no-nonsense side to Uncle Nat. I discovered that side unexpectedly one morning. As we were chatting over breakfast, our conversation was interrupted by a loud scream. Looking out of the large picture window, I saw across the yard in front of the tiny jail a huge uniformed policeman bent over a cowering, shackled man on the ground, unmercifully flogging him with a long wooden cane. Uncle Nat resumed his breakfast as if nothing was happening, while both the beating and screams increased in intensity. When I asked him whether he wasn’t going to put a stop to this barbaric spectacle, Uncle Nat informed me that he hadn’t the slightest intention of doing so and that the prisoner whom he had sentenced to be flogged had deserved every lick he was getting and more. “Some of these natives,” Uncle Nat explained, after noticing that I was visibly shaken by the morning’s events, “don’t respect anything but brute force because they were reared that way. Reasoning with them and telling them not to do it again would be a total waste of time.”

  “What about putting them in jail and letting them serve time?” I tried to argue.

  “We simply don’t have the resources to incarcerate thousands of lawbreakers for any length of time,” Uncle Nat responded. “The best way to deal with most of the criminal elements on this plantation is to give them a good whipping that, hopefully, they won’t forget very soon.”

  Maybe Uncle Nat had a point when he said that Liberian tribal people are reared in a brutal fashion. I recalled seeing one of Morris’s aunts tie up a little boy about six years old, wash his eyes, mouth, and nose with a rag dipped in a solution of pepper, then whip him unmercifully with a stick. His crime: denying that he had embezzled a nickel, which he spit out during his ordeal.

  Gradually, the screams subsided and changed to moans as the policeman finished his gruesome task. Next, he grabbed his victim and dumped him down a hole, which he covered with a wooden plank and weighed down with a heavy steel drum.

  I was about to resume my argument for more lenient treatment of prisoners, but Morris gestured me to keep my mouth shut.

  “Tomorrow, if you like, you and Morris can come with me to court and see what it’s like,” Uncle Nat suggested. “But I want you to keep in mind that this is Liberia, not Germany. We have different standards here.”

  We gladly accepted his invitation. As far as different standards of jurisprudence between Germany and Liberia were concerned, I recalled some of the known atrocities of Nazi justice and was convinced that Liberian jails must seem like luxury spas compared with the horror chambers of the Gestapo.

  I had already learned that my uncle, as highest representative of the Liberian government on the Firestone plantation, was regarded by the thousands of plantation workers as the ultimate authority and that the awe in which he was held was not confined to blacks. White American Firestone staffers, too, had learned to respect the short, rotund man whom they called “the German judge,” because he delighted in letting them know that he had received much of his legal training in pre-Nazi Germany. Unlike his predecessors, who had treated white lawbreakers on the plantation with kid gloves, Nat had built his reputation as a tough and impartial judge by being the first judge to have white troublemakers arrested and thrown in jail. Most of these cases involved the blatant mistreatment of African workers. In each such case Nat would stay incommunicado for several days, ostensibly while “visiting his farm in the country,” to prevent Firestone officials from springing their wayward employees from jail by hastily making bail. Such antics had the full backing of President Tubman, who enjoyed regaling his Saturday Afternoon Club pals with the German judge’s original way of dispensing justice.

  The tiny courtroom next to the compound’s jail was packed with villagers in native dress when Uncle Nat, followed by Morris and me, entered. A policeman serving as bailiff told the crowd to “stand up and be quiet” as Uncle Nat, dressed in a white suit, took his elevated seat on the bench and Morris and I sat down in two ringside chairs that had been reserved for us.

  For the next three hours, a long procession of plaintiffs stepped forward with complaints that ranged from theft of a goat to adultery. In each case, Uncle Nat listened patiently to both sides, asked a few questions—often in country people’s jargon, which he mastered to a T—then, after a brief moment of reflection, announced a verdict based mostly on common sense rather than on the written law. In the majority of cases, the verdict was a compromise aimed at satisfying both parties. An adultery case was thrown out and the husband was denied the traditional compensatory reward he had been seeking because testimony revealed that he had actually encouraged his wife to have an affair with the defendant, a plantation foreman, in order to collect damages. “This is the second time you are pulling this stunt,” Uncle Nat admonished the plaintiff. “The next time you come into this court with the same story, I’ll throw you in jail for pimping.”

  In keeping with the notoriously low plantation wages of twenty-five cents a day, the fines leveled by Nat rarely exceeded three dollars. In some cases he ordered the defendants to pay their fines in chickens or goats, or make restitution b
y helping a plaintiff build a new hut. I could clearly see now what Uncle Nat meant when he told me, “We have different standards here.”

  ROBERTSFIELD

  The day following our introduction to country-style justice, Nat took Morris and me to Robertsfield for job interviews with Mat Adams, the president of Liberian International Airways. It was obvious from the start that Adams, a stocky Yankee from New York City, was less interested in obtaining Morris’s and my services than in winning political brownie points. Before Morris and I had a chance to fully explain our respective qualifications as machinist and auto mechanic, he told us that we could start the following day for ten dollars a day and thanked Uncle Nat profusely for giving him a chance to be of service.

  While hanging out with black sailors on Hamburg’s waterfront, I had been told of the concept of “Uncle Tomming,” obsequious behavior exhibited by blacks toward whites. What I had just witnessed clearly demonstrated to me that blacks had no monopoly on this sort of behavior. It occurred to me that power, not skin color, was the determining factor, and that since in Liberia blacks held the power, Tomming often became the province of whites.

  Life at Robertsfield turned out much more to our liking than our wretched existence in the mosquito-infested jungle of Brewerville. Robertsfield had served U.S bombers as a base from which they launched raids on Field Marshal Rommel’s Panzer units in North Africa. It was by no means the hub of world air travel, but it boasted a few amenities that were missing in Brewerville, including a small restaurant and a post office.

  Morris and I were assigned to the repair shop of the airport’s motor pool, headed by Mike Omsted, a forty-something California-born Swede, who had drifted on the base from who knows where. He had been hired on the spot after a day’s demonstration that he knew his stuff. Mike, a lanky six-footer with long sideburns and a pockmarked face, was responsible for keeping the company’s small fleet of pickups, jeeps, and sedans running. When it came to autos, he had the reputation of being a genius, capable of taking any old broken-down vehicle that had been declared dead and breathing new life into it. Even Morris, himself no mean auto mechanic, was impressed with Mike’s mechanical genius.