Destined to Witness

  WATCH OUT, COLONEL SANDERS!

  The next time we arrived in Monrovia for Morris’s periodic report at Police Headquarters, I learned that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, a native Liberian and his German wife who had recently arrived from Europe and whom I had met at Robertsfield, had opened a small restaurant. The two welcomed Morris and me with open arms and proudly showed us their cozy establishment. It was packed to capacity, mostly, Mr. Johnson confided, because of the popularity of his wife’s chicken soup. After each of us had wolfed down a bowl of the delicacy, we agreed that they had a winner.

  “I wish you were right,” Mr. Johnson replied, “but my problem at the moment is that the demand for our chicken soup is much greater than our supply of chickens. If I could only get my hands on enough chickens, this place would be a gold mine.”

  “How much do you pay for one chicken?” Morris asked.

  “Depending on the size, I’d say on average about one dollar,” Mr. Johnson replied.

  “Then how about you letting us worry about the chickens?” Morris asked, pointing toward me and himself.

  For a moment I thought Morris had flipped. Where in the world was he going to get chickens? But he motioned for me to keep my mouth shut. Later he reminded me that each of the villages we had visited so far had a small flock of chickens. According to Morris, we could stop at a number of villages on our way to the interior and let the people know that on our return trip we would buy as many chickens as they could scrounge up for fifty cents apiece. Then we would drive to Monrovia and sell the chickens to Mr. Johnson for a profit of fifty cents each. In order not to arouse unnecessary attention that would let people know that the Liberian National Police Force was a partner in a chicken-transport venture, he would schedule our arrivals in Monrovia late at night when traffic was at a minimum.

  Morris’s plan worked like a charm. The next time we returned to Monrovia, the police pickup was loaded to the sky with coops of cackling live chickens. We were ecstatic as Mr. Johnson paid us nearly a hundred dollars. “Just keep the chickens coming,” he urged.

  We decided to reinvest our entire profits in chickens, and in a few days had amassed five hundred dollars, a veritable fortune by our standards. We talked about nothing else but chickens while dreaming of ever greater chicken fortunes. Morris was seriously considering turning in his police badge, buying a pickup truck, and going into the chicken business full time. But as quickly as it had started, our chicken dream bubble burst when our suppliers told us that they were fast running out of merchandise. We simply had bought up their chickens faster than new ones could be hatched and grown. In each village we visited, the number of available chickens dropped steadily until we were told the dreaded news, “Sorry, no more chickens for sale.” That ended our high expectation of becoming chicken tycoons. Yet before I had a chance to mourn our great loss, my spirits received an unexpected lift that no chicken fortune could have given me. I was informed by my friend, Consul Hanson of the U.S. Embassy, that he had been authorized to issue me a one-year student visa to the United States.

  When I wrote Aunt Clara that my student visa had arrived, she promptly mailed me a six-hundred-dollar airline ticket and urged me to make my travel arrangements as soon as possible and to telephone her as soon as I had arrived in New York. I didn’t need any urging, although I wondered why she wanted me to fly, since ship’s passage was considerably cheaper. I finally reasoned that since she had also enrolled me at a university although she knew that I had no money and would be prohibited from working, she probably was wealthy. Whatever her reason for giving me the royal treatment, it was all right with me.

  IN THE “HOME OF THE BRAVE”

  On May 22, 1950, carrying the obligatory battered suitcase containing my best (and only) suit and a half dozen shirts and neckties, and with about a hundred dollars in cash—the remainder of my share of the chicken proceeds—in my pocket, I prepared to board a New York-bound Pan Am clipper at Robertsfield, eager to join my pal Werner and the rest of the tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free and make a buck.

  The only thing that dimmed my joy over having finally attained my goal was the thought of leaving Morris. During my two-year stay in Liberia, we had become all but inseparable. Although reared in different cultures on different continents and not aware of each other’s existence until we were adults, we had bonded more closely than some brothers who had grown up together.

  Eager not to betray any emotions, we made small talk in the small passengers’ lounge while I awaited the signal to board for my first airplane ride.

  “Take good care of yourself, little brother,” Morris admonished, as always ignoring the four inches in height that actually made him the little brother. “And write me all about how you’re making out.” He promised to visit me in the States as soon as he was financially flush again. Remembering my brother’s chronic shortage of cash, I sadly said goodbye, suspecting that it would be a long time before I’d see him again.

  From the moment the plane took off, I became so fascinated with the new experience of flying that my somber, reflective mood was soon replaced by excited anticipation. After a brief stop in Lisbon, Portugal, we continued our flight to the United States. The closer we came to our destination, the more impatient I became and the more I wondered whether the idealistic image I had of the United States had any basis in reality. Although Werner’s letters had painted a rosy picture of life in New York City, some of my black American friends in Liberia, including Charles Hanson, had told me that race relations were far from perfect and warned me that I might never get used to that side of the “American Way.”

  My negative thoughts were dispelled temporarily as, in the wee hours of morning and about an hour behind schedule, we approached LaGuardia International Airport and a gigantic carpet of millions of lights came in sight. I had written Werner when I would arrive and wondered whether he had received my letter in time to meet me at the airport. But as soon as I had reached the bottom of the gangway a uniformed airline employee asked me whether my name was Hans Massaquoi. When I told him yes, he said, “Thank God! A young fellow by the name of Werner has been bugging us for hours trying to find out whether you have arrived.”

  I saw Werner waving at me among a crowd of relatives and friends waiting for passengers. After I cleared immigration and customs, we finally had a chance to hug and to take a good look at each other after nearly three years of separation. Werner looked great. Unlike in Hamburg, where his taste ran from electric blue pin-striped suits to hand-painted ties depicting bathing beauties, he was conservatively dressed in a neat gray double-breasted suit and a carefully color-coordinated tie.

  I was duly impressed when we arrived at 210 Riverside Drive, where a uniformed doorman greeted us like royalty. I wondered how, on his meager office clerk’s salary, he could afford to live in such a lavish style, until an elevator operator took us to the eleventh floor and I saw the size of his super-neat apartment. Although minuscule, it boasted a spectacular view of the Hudson River and the never-ending traffic on Riverside Drive. “I’d rather live in a small apartment in a great neighborhood than in a huge apartment in a slum, especially when the price is about the same,” Werner reasoned.

  In the following days, Werner showed me his New York—Broadway, Central Park, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Village, Germantown, Chinatown, the Bowery, and Grand Central Station. As we strolled through Manhattan, I immediately felt at home. It seemed as if I were experiencing déjà vu, as if I had been there before. Everything seemed so familiar to me, undoubtedly because of the many Hollywood movies I had seen. New York was exactly as I had expected.

  Venturing out on my own in Harlem, where I had promised Charles Hanson I would say hello to his father, I had my only surprise. Instead of the menacing slums with lurking shadowy figures I had seen so often in U.S. films, I saw neighborhoods peopled by active, working-class folks not much different from those in my old Hamburg neighborhood. Th
e only difference was that everyone—from the mailman to the barber to the policeman to the garbage collector to the occasional big shot in a Cadillac convertible—was black. As I walked along busy 125th Street totally ignored by the people around me, I had the brand-new experience of really blending in. At the same time I realized that I was still light-years away from feeling that I belonged.

  Before I left for Chicago, Werner made me promise that if things didn’t work out for me in Illinois, I would head back to New York and stay with him. When my bus arrived in downtown Chicago, I was met by Aunt Clara, my cousin Martha, and her husband, Rudolph. I recognized them immediately from the pictures Martha had sent me while I still lived in Germany. Although three years younger than my mother, Clara looked much older and bore little resemblance to her. Martha, a statuesque brunette with a pretty doll face, and her husband, a tall, studious-looking fellow with horn-rimmed glasses, made a striking couple. Undeterred by the curious stares of black and white bystanders, they all hugged me and seemed delighted that I finally had arrived.

  To help me get situated, Rudolph and Martha, who lived in Chicago, said they would ride with us to Barrington, the Chicago suburb where Clara lived with her youngest son, Willie. During the one-hour train ride to Barrington, I sat beside Rudolph. When I told him how much I had looked forward to coming to Barrington, he told me, with a side glance at his mother-in-law, “You have my deepest sympathy.”

  That remark jolted me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you, but you’ll soon find out.”

  He was right. Arriving in Barrington, we walked about half a mile along the railroad tracks and passed several respectable-looking homes before we came to what at first looked like an empty lot but what on closer inspection turned out to contain a low-slung, jerry-built wood-and-tar-paper shack.

  “This is it,” whispered Rudolph, “your new home. Welcome to Barrington.”

  I was stunned. Unable to say anything, I followed my aunt into the shack, whose interior turned out to be no more than its outside appearance suggested. Suddenly I felt sorry for my aunt and at the same time sorry for myself. How, I asked myself, did my aunt, who obviously lived in abject poverty and could barely take care of herself, intend to put me through college? Why hadn’t she leveled with me? Where did she get the six hundred dollars to buy my ticket?

  Totally oblivious to the thoughts racing through my mind, Aunt Clara invited me to make myself at home. “You can take Hermann’s room,” she said, referring to her oldest son, who had married and, like his sister, had moved to Chicago. Later that evening, after Martha and Rudolph had left, my cousin Willie arrived. Unlike his mother and sister, he greeted me with unconcealed disdain, which, I learned later, had nothing to do with race but everything to do with economics. A strapping blond six-footer who made his living as a tree surgeon, Willie made no secret of the fact that he considered me a worrisome burden on his mother’s already overtaxed budget and that she needed another mouth to feed like she needed a hole in her head. I couldn’t blame him for feeling that way, although the problem I obviously presented wasn’t of my making. My only mistake had been to assume my aunt knew what she was doing when apparently she did not. Had she given the slightest indication of her true financial status, that the six hundred dollars for my airline ticket had been advanced by my uncle Hermann, my mother’s oldest brother, or that she eked out a meager living cleaning homes for Barrington’s rich folks, I would never have accepted her unrealistic generosity.

  In due time I would learn that at the root of Aunt Clara’s personality was a common-sense-defying belief that—in the face of staggering evidence to the contrary—things would turn out the way she wanted. It was that naive belief that caused her to enroll me in college, although she hadn’t a clue what to do about tuition. By the same token, she had encouraged me to apply for a student visa although she had been told that foreign students were not ordinarily permitted to work. “We’ll worry about that after you get here,” she had blithely written. Unfortunately, when things didn’t turn out the way she visualized, she looked for a scapegoat, which in this case turned out to be me.

  After a couple of weeks of putting up with her and her son’s growing hostility while trying to adjust to my new life in a little shack on the outskirts of an affluent, all-white suburban community, I looked back with longing to the carefree days when Morris and I were roaming the Liberian countryside. But just as I was contemplating the new mess in which I found myself and wracking my brain figuring how to get out of it, we were visited by my Aunt Hedwig and her husband, Gust Galske. The two had driven from their small farm in nearby Bartlett, Illinois, in their Model A Ford—a gift from Uncle Hermann, who had given up driving—to get a glimpse of me. I took one look at Aunt Hedwig, an older version of my mother, and she at me, and it was mutual love at first sight. I also took an immediate liking to Uncle Gust, a ruddy-faced, coverall-clad giant with a gray mop of hair and a booming voice, which, to the constant chagrin of Aunt Hedwig, he used invariably to cuss and to laugh infectiously at the end of each of his ribald jokes.

  While Gust kept Aunt Clara in stitches, Aunt Hedwig took me aside and told me that even before I had arrived in the United States, she and Uncle Gust had been quite aware that I was coming into an impossible situation. “Uncle Gust and I want you to come and spend some time with us on our farm,” she told me. “We have plenty of space and plenty of food. You don’t have to, but if you like, you can help Gust with the chores. Then we can figure out what to do next.”

  I felt like hugging her on the spot. “But how do I tell Aunt Clara?” I asked. “After all, she started the ball rolling in getting me to the States.”

  “You just leave that to me,” Aunt Hedwig assured me. “I’ll tell her the truth, which is that I’m your aunt, too, and entitled to have you spend some time with me, simple as that. If I know my sister, she’s probably glad by now to get rid of you.”

  Aunt Hedwig was right. Aunt Clara didn’t show the slightest misgiving when Hedwig told her that she wanted me to spend some time on her farm. Aunt Clara even helped pack my things. When I told her goodbye, I had the distinct feeling that our relationship had gone as far as it could.

  Helping Aunt Hedwig feed her flock of chickens and Uncle Gust his cows and mules soon made me forget the trouble I had seen in Barrington and reminded me somewhat of my childhood visits in Salza with Tante Grete and Onkel Karl. Aunt Hedwig turned out to be the living doll she appeared to be when we first met, as did Uncle Gust. I also got along well with my cousin Johnny, a quiet World War II navy veteran with a permanent five o’clock shadow, and his wife Shirley, a dark-haired woman who also lived on the farm with their infant boy, John, Jr.

  Talking about her own marriage, Aunt Hedwig confided in me that after a failed marriage to an alcoholic Swiss farmer who gambled their farm away and left her stranded with two boys, Lothar and Johnny, she took a job as housekeeper for bachelor Gust and his blind mother. Shortly before her death, the mother asked Hedwig to stay on the farm and marry her son.

  “Gust is a good man,” she concluded, “just a little rough at the edges.”

  “What do you mean, Toots,” bellowed Gust, “rough at the edges? The trouble with you women is that you have no sense of humor, no sense of humor at all. Isn’t that right, Junior?” Without waiting for me to agree, he slapped himself on his thigh and let out a burst of laughs between shouts of “Jesus Christ!”

  After that, he plunked his massive frame on a chair in the kitchen, rolled a lumpy cigarette with his Bratwurst-size fingers, then lighted it with a huge farm match that he ignited on a metal button of his coveralls. “No sense of humor,” he kept repeating while filling the kitchen with big puffs of smoke.

  “See what I mean?” Aunt Hedwig addressed me, convinced that Gust had helped her make her point.

  One weekend we were visited by my uncle Hermann, Mutti’s oldest brother, whose generosity to his relatives I had heard so much about an
d had unknowingly experienced myself. A stocky, suspendered man with short-cropped gray hair, he told me not to lose any sleep over it when I told him that as soon as I was able, I would pay him back the six hundred dollars he had advanced me for my airfare. “Don’t you vorry about it. You pay me when you have ze money,” he said with a thick German accent. “I know I can trust you because you are Bertha’s son.” It made me feel good to hear that. Although they had not seen one another for more than thirty years, he still trusted her to have passed on her honesty to me. Immediately I resolved to prove to him that his trust in his sister and me was not misplaced and to pay off my debt as soon as I could.

  While the wholesome lifestyle on the farm was therapeutic, I couldn’t forget that in four months I was scheduled to enroll at the Aeronautical University or forfeit my student status. I figured that if I could find a job during that time, although legally I was not supposed to work, I could make enough money to pay at least a part of my tuition. When I asked Johnny to help me find a job in the Elgin Watch Company in nearby Elgin, Illinois, where he worked, he told me that they weren’t hiring but that he would take me to Woodruff and Edwards, a foundry in Elgin, where he had heard they were looking for lathe operators.

  The next morning, Johnny took me to the foundry in his shiny, near-new Hudson. When Johnny introduced me as his cousin, the personnel manager registered only a flicker of surprise but made no comment. After a ten-minute interview, he took me to the foundry’s machine shop, where row upon row of medium-size lathes were humming away. Interestingly, all the lathe operators were white; the few blacks I saw were pulling hand trucks and operating forklifts.