Destined to Witness

  Since new spare parts were often impossible to come by, Mike solved that problem by cannibalizing parts from some of the hundreds of vehicles the U.S. Army had left behind to rot at the edge of the airstrip when it pulled out at the end of World War II. But often Mike was stymied when he was unable to get his hands on a certain metal part. That’s where I came in. Following Mike’s rough sketch of the missing part, I’d put my German machinist’s skill to work and usually had no problem making the part he needed. Morris, too, quickly impressed upon Mike that he knew his way around engines. It gave both of us a great deal of satisfaction to be able to demonstrate to the company’s head that having hired us not only made good political sense but also good business sense.

  For the most part, Morris and I were pretty satisfied with our lifestyle at Robertsfield. On weekends, we usually caught a ride to Monrovia to catch up on our social life, which, thanks to our new status as gainfully employed bachelors, was beginning to prosper. But just when we felt that things were going fine, we were rudely reminded of the precariousness of life.

  The reminder came in the form of an explosion that could have crippled us for the rest of our lives. Like many times before, Morris had been trying to coax a car engine to overcome its reluctance to start by pouring a cup of gasoline down its carburetor. When, after a brief start, the engine stalled again, Morris asked me to stand by with another cup of gasoline to help him feed the carburetor and thus keep the engine running. But instead of the car starting, a huge flame burst from the carburetor that instantaneously jumped to Morris’s cup of gasoline. In an involuntary reflex action, Morris threw the burning cup into the air, unfortunately in my direction, where it ignited the gasoline cup I was holding. Instantly, both of our hands were in flames like torches. Flailing our arms about in an effort to extinguish the flames only made matters worse, and the flames grew bigger with the added oxygen our movement supplied. After burning up all the gasoline that had spilled on our hands, the flames died as suddenly as they had erupted. But our ordeal had just begun. Initially numb, our hands suddenly started to hurt with a ferocity that made us want to scream at the top of our lungs, but we merely allowed an occasional moan as a driver from the motor pool rushed us to the Firestone hospital. How I managed to remain conscious during the twenty-minute ride as the pain grew more and more intense, I shall never know.

  While a Liberian nurse cleaned and bandaged our hands, a young white American doctor administered painkillers and told us that we had been quite lucky: we sustained only second-degree burns, which, he predicted, should heal within two weeks, provided we didn’t have any complications from infection. After emergency treatment we were wheeled to the overcrowded, segregated “native ward” of the hospital, where I had difficulty deciding which was worse, the loud chatter of the patients or the smell of food and disinfectant.

  When it was time to eat and two nurses tried to feed us some ill-smelling slop that went for food in the “native ward,” both Morris and I balked. “Tell them we can’t eat this stuff,” Morris told the nurses, who dutifully took our bowls back to the kitchen. When there was no response to our protest, we started to have second thoughts. Maybe we acted too hastily, we speculated; perhaps bad food was preferable to no food. Eventually, a white hospital administrator informed us that he had just received instructions to move us to a private room. Profusely apologizing for the “mistake,” he said he would personally see to it that everything possible would be done to make our stay at the hospital comfortable. Later, when Uncle Nat showed up to pay us a visit, we began to understand what “mistake” the administrator had been talking about. When we were admitted, the hospital staffers had no idea that we were nephews of the all-powerful German judge until Uncle Nat, having learned of our accident, telephoned the hospital to find out how we were doing. The hospital then realized that the two emergency cases they had put into their native ward were actually relatives of a Liberian VIP. Since at that time, even in black-ruled Liberia, it was unthinkable to put black patients in a white ward, the customary alternative was to put black VIPs into private rooms within the white ward. That was fine with us, especially since the food that was served immediately after our transfer smelled, looked, and tasted much better.

  Recovering, Morris and I had ample time to reflect on our sad predicament. One minute we had felt on top of the world; the next minute we found ourselves in a substandard section of a hospital, shot full of morphine, with our arms bandaged to the elbows. Grateful for the doctor’s assurance that the accident would cause no permanent damage, I decided to let bygones be bygones and not blame Morris.

  For want of something better to do with our time, we cultivated the friendship of several nurses on the ward. Before long, several of them would drop in on us more frequently than their job required in order to chat and keep us company. One beautiful nurse in particular had caught Morris’s and my eye. On several occasions she had let me know that she was interested in getting better acquainted. Since I knew what was on Morris’s mind, I decided to beat him to the punch—a small payback, I figured, for two burned hands.

  It was her duty to look in on us each night and to hand each of us two sleeping pills before turning off the lights. Each time, I’d whisper to her that as soon as my bandages were off, we’d have our date. In response, she would stroke my cheek and, with a look that seemed to promise paradise, wish me good night.

  One morning, as I awoke, Morris was sitting upright in his bed across the room grinning at me from ear to ear. Suddenly it dawned on me—he had scored with the nurse while I was asleep. He gleefully confessed that it had been relatively easy. When the nurse passed out the sleeping pills, he waited until I swallowed mine while merely pretending to swallow his. After that, he said, it was literally like taking candy from a baby. All he had to do was wait till I had fallen asleep before making his move.

  That interlude, which as far as Morris was concerned was supposed to have ended after our discharge from the hospital, had a more lasting effect than either of us had anticipated. Several months after we left the hospital, Morris was informed by the nurse that he was about to become a proud papa. As a sort of consolation prize to me, Morris named his firstborn son Hans, after his uncle, who had been present, albeit fast asleep, during his conception.

  A few days after we had resumed working at Robertsfield, Morris informed me that he was quitting his job. He planned to appeal to President Tubman to give him a government job and urged me to come along and do the same. “I know the old man will help us if we ask him,” he said. “Anyway, I’m sick and tired of this grease monkey business. This time I’ll get me a real job. And I know exactly how,” he told me before packing his few belongings and catching a ride to Monrovia.

  Having gotten used to having a brother around, I futilely tried to change his mind, since I had no intention of giving up my job before I had found a better one.

  Morris had often told me that you couldn’t get ahead in Liberia unless you joined the Masons. Thus, I was not surprised to learn when he visited me several months later that he had become a Mason and that, thanks to his connections, he was rapidly rising in the Masonic hierarchy. When I asked him for details, my usually talkative brother turned uncharacteristically tight-lipped. He did tell me that he had just accidentally run into President Tubman, who, he explained, was to Liberia’s Masons what the pope is to Roman Catholics. Morris said that when he shook the president’s hand and gave him that secret signal that revealed his Masonic degree, the president’s eyes popped. Seizing the moment, Morris then asked the president for an appointment for the following week, intending to ask the president to give him a government job.

  “You can put in a word for me, too,” I said, more in jest than earnest, since the last thing I could imagine was sitting behind a desk all day. Little did I realize then that there would come a time when, as a journalist, I would spend a considerable amount of time doing just that.

  SAMMY

  Although I wasn’t making a lot o
f money, I was satisfied with my job, at least for the moment, because it gave me a sense of security and independence. It had even made it possible for me to hire a houseboy, a bright young fellow from the Bassa tribe by the name of Sammy. Sammy, who said he thought he was about fifteen, had knocked on my door one day and asked whether I needed someone to keep house. I told him that there really wasn’t a great deal of work to be done and, more important, that I didn’t earn enough money to afford hired help. Sammy said that it didn’t matter how little I paid him as long as I would also “teach (him) book,” meaning to read and write. I agreed to pay him five dollars a week, by prevailing Liberian standards an astronomical sum, and to teach him all the book he could absorb. In return, he would sweep my room, wash and iron what little laundry I had, and for the rest of the day sit around with his houseboy colleagues and shoot the breeze. After I’d return from work, I’d switch to my teacher’s hat and, for an hour or so, help Sammy demystify the alphabet. Fortunately, he was a quick study, and although he had started from scratch, he rewarded my efforts by reading simple sentences in less than a month.

  Overall, I was quite pleased with Sammy’s job performance. For a guy who didn’t own a watch, he was punctual like Benito Mussolini’s trains, always arriving shortly before I had to leave for the shop, and in his own way he was scrupulously honest, although his definition of the word stealing differed somewhat from mine. Never mind that my clothes were several sizes too large for him, Sammy couldn’t resist his annoying habit of “borrowing” my shirts, pants, and socks to wear on special occasions at his village and return them—ring around the collar, funk and all—the next day. No matter how often I told him that taking things that didn’t belong to him was stealing, even if he intended to return them, Sammy was irresistibly drawn to my clothes. One day, when I lectured him for the umpteenth time about borrowing my things, and even threatened to fire him, he confided to me that among his peers, “white man clothes” like mine, especially long pants, were status symbols without which a man would always be treated like a “small boy.”

  The next time I went to Monrovia, I bought a pair of khaki slacks and a couple of shirts. “These are yours,” I told Sammy, “under the condition that from now on you leave my stuff alone.”

  Sammy beamed like a lighthouse beacon as he changed into his new clothes and promised to mend his ways. It was the first time I had seen him in long pants; I had to agree that even without shoes, which he detested, they made him look more respectable. “I guess I’ll have to call you ‘Mr. Sammy’ from now on,” I joked. Ignoring the joke, Sammy nodded consent. So from then on, I was careful never to call him Sammy without the prefix.

  RECONCILIATION IN THE NICK OF TIME

  Since my father had not replied to my long letter of complaint, I surmised that our breakup, as far as he was concerned, was irreconcilable. Having proved to myself that I could survive in Liberia without him, I no longer feared him and his wrath. Rather, I pitied him for being such a small-minded person who lived an isolated existence, virtually without close friends or family, in his own mental prison. Eventually, I realized that perhaps I should be the one to extend the olive branch. Morris seconded the motion, and we decided to use the pending New Year’s Eve as the occasion to visit our father.

  When we arrived at his house, Jason let us in. “Your pa is alone. Go right upstairs.” I hadn’t set foot in my father’s house since that fateful night seven months before, when I made my hasty getaway. “What do we have here?” Our father chuckled as he got a glimpse of us. “If it isn’t my two rascal sons.”

  I could tell he was pleased to see us. Holding out my olive branch in the form of a bottle of good whiskey we had bought with our hard-earned money, I told him that we happened to be in the neighborhood and thought we’d drop by to wish him a happy New Year. “Let’s see what kind of cheap whiskey you chaps have brought me here,” he joked, in a transparent attempt to hide his emotions. Neither Morris nor I took offense, and after a brief exchange during which none of our problems were mentioned, we said goodbye. Before we had a chance to walk away, our father reached into his pocket, extracted two $100 bills from his wallet, and handed them to us. “Happy New Year, sons. Have yourselves a drink on me. By the way,” he added, laughing, “did I ever tell you that you two remind me of Pat and Patachon?” Our difference in height reminded him of the popular European comedy team from the twenties and thirties. Morris and I took our father’s jovial attitude as a sign that he was mellowing and that, perhaps, there was still hope for working out our differences.

  We never had a chance to find out. Two months later, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a knock on my door. It was my foreman, Mike Omsted. He had learned from the airport’s radio operator that my father had been in a serious automobile accident in the interior of the country and that the tiny dispensary in Ganta where he had been taken for emergency treatment had radioed an urgent request for oxygen. “Just get dressed and let’s go!” Mike hollered. “I already have two oxygen bottles in the pickup.”

  Taking turns behind the wheel, we raced silently through the night over unpaved clay roads through small native settlements and across rickety bridges, some of which consisted of only two parallel flattened tree trunks. “He mustn’t die” was my only, incessant, thought. By dawn, we reached Ganta, a small village of clay huts. Someone showed us to the village dispensary, where, in one of the rooms, my father was lying on a large bed. His neck and chest were covered with blood-soaked bandages. When we entered the room, he opened his eyes and a sign of recognition came over his face as he spotted me. He moved his lips, but no sound came from his mouth. All I could do was grab his hand and hold it. I was amazed at the strength with which he returned my grasp. It seemed as if he were afraid to let go of me. I looked down at his right hand, the one that had pursued me in my absurd, fever-induced hallucination, and found it difficult to imagine that I had ever been afraid of him.

  After we left the room, a medic from the dispensary briefed us on my father’s condition. He had a cut windpipe and had sustained major injuries to his chest. If he could be transported to Monrovia to undergo surgery, the medic explained, he had a good chance of recovery. Unfortunately, because of the rough and extremely dusty roads, it had been determined that my father would not survive the long trip to the capital. To compound the problem, the small airplane frequently used to shuttle people to and from Monrovia needed major repairs and was out of service. Our only option was to have one of the dispensary’s visiting physicians attempt emergency surgery to stabilize my father, then move him to Monrovia when he had improved somewhat.

  We learned that my father, in his endless pursuit of business deals, had been driving a van that was loaded to the top with bags of rice when an oncoming truck drove by. Since the truck left a long trail of red dust behind, my father did not see that a second oncoming truck had moved into his lane in order to pass the first truck. The second truck struck his van head-on. My father was critically injured and his van totaled, while the oncoming truck and its driver were barely fazed. Miraculously, one of my father’s houseboys who was riding in the back of the van also escaped injury.

  Mike reminded me that there was nothing for us to do but return to Robertsfield. But before we did, we went to the scene of the accident a few miles outside Ganta. What we saw made me shudder. There was still a great deal of dried blood at the scene, which had to be my father’s. His van, what was left of it, was a tangle of twisted sheet metal, steel beams, engine parts, and broken glass. The wheels, it appeared, had already been picked clean of tires by “salvagers,” as was the interior of the van, which showed no trace that it had been loaded with rice. It reminded me of the old saying, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” For the hungry bellies of the poor villagers of Ganta, my father’s accident and several thousand pounds of rice must have been a welcome windfall.

  After ten days of anxiously waiting, Morris and I learned that our father had died. All that remained for
us to do was bring his body back to Monrovia and mourn. As much as I tried to find solace by telling myself that he had never been much of a father, especially during all those years when I needed a father the most, I felt an overpowering sense of sadness and the excruciating pain of having sustained an irreparable loss. He may not have been the father I had craved as a young boy and especially when I reached my teens, but he was the only father I had.

  The funeral, which had been arranged by Uncle Nat, was attended by hundreds of mourners from the Vai community as well as by members of the Liberian government, including Vice President Simpson, who represented the out-of-town President Tubman. After the funeral, Morris and I learned that our dear Uncle Nat—while publicly posing as the bereaved and inconsolable brother—had been busy behind our backs with another agenda. Using his influence and his knowledge of the law, he had himself appointed sole administrator of our father’s estate. He was aided by the fact that, as far as we could determine, my father had died without leaving a will.

  Since we had always been on friendly terms with our uncle, Morris and I didn’t contest his grab for power, although we considered his action highly inappropriate, since we were both of legal age and didn’t require a guardian. It didn’t take us long to discover that Nat intended to cheat Morris and me out of our rightful inheritance. Recalling my father’s disclosure to me that Nat was the leader of a family conspiracy to steal his money, I confronted Nat and demanded that he keep us informed of anything regarding the estate, especially its size and what he was doing with the proceeds from renting our father’s house to Lebanese traders. Nat readily agreed, but kept stalling. Figuring we had waited long enough, we kept pressing him for some information. Finally Nat told us that to his great shock and dismay he had discovered that our father, instead of being a millionaire, had actually died a pauper, with hardly any assets to his name. The best thing to do under the circumstances, he advised, was to keep our mouths shut and not let the public know about this “embarrassing situation.”