American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  As the civil rights movement developed and desegregation became law during the 1960s and 1970s, the racial tensions of the era were keenly felt in Pine Hills. The neighborhood, although part of relatively metropolitan Orlando, was a segregated southern community. The local Ku Klux Klan remained entrenched in the Orange County government and sheriff’s office until the 1950s, and until the 1960s many home titles in the neighborhood contained the provision that the property could not be sold to a black owner. In 1973 Pine Hills residents openly protested school busing aimed to desegregate their school systems. But just seven years later, in 1980, the Orlando Sentinel would describe Pine Hills as “the leading edge of racial change in the Orlando area.” Over the course of the 1980s, white residents would flee the neighborhood in droves, dropping from 91 percent of the residents in 1981 to just 28 percent in 2000.

  In April 1987 Bernice purchased a two-story home on a quiet street off a county road in Pine Hills.32 (Though she was married to Roy, the deed listed her as “unmarried.”) The Belfasts’ appearance on the block was part of a larger migration of West Indian families from the Northeast to Orlando. When Chucky entered school, however, he found that his background carried some stigma. The children drew cultural lines not just between island kids and locals but also between “northerners” and Floridians.33

  A rise in crime rates contributed to the tensions in the area.34 In the late 1980s Orlando, like other U.S. cities, suffered a lethal combination of children and guns. By the early 1990s Pine Hills became a front line in this crisis. Local teens formed gangs like the Hiawassee Posse, the Pork n’ Beans gang, and the Pine Hill Boys. These crews resembled groups of neighborhood friends more than organized street gangs like those in Los Angeles and Chicago. Local cops attributed the trend to popular movies like Colors, which depicted—and glamorized—gang culture and violence. But as these groups acquired guns—and began using them—the distinction mattered little to local law enforcement. The Orange County sheriff’s department created a task force called the Alpha Team to deal with the emerging problem.35

  In 1990 the local police began officially counting drive-by shootings—a phenomenon that had been a novelty just two years earlier. By 1991 the office tracked twenty-six drive-bys among the more than two thousand shootings countywide. At times, the law enforcement response drew controversy. In 1991 Orange County sheriff’s deputies shot three Pine Hills teens—the youngest, fifteen years old—during a robbery sting. The incident drew public recriminations and prompted Florida’s governor to call for an investigation into the use of police force.

  This violence was not abstract for Chucky, whose neighborhood became known as “Crime Hills.” Children were forced to adopt the sort of self-preservation tactics that were more familiar in inner cities. As a young teen, he had to stake out his name among the neighborhood kids. Having grown from a lanky adolescent into a huskier teen, he soon developed the reputation as a tough kid in a tough crowd—as one former girlfriend said, “an alpha among alphas.” Schoolyard legends surrounded him: according to one, Chucky took on a crowd of Floridians who had singled him out as a northerner, holding them off alone with a brick. All this translated into problems at school, which eventually landed Chucky in a high school for discipline cases.

  Meanwhile, shortly after their arrival in Orlando, Chucky’s parents’ relationship began to deteriorate.36 From the day of their wedding in 1983, their marriage had had baggage: Roy’s unresolved divorce from his prior marriage, Bernice’s marriage to a hairdresser in 1989 (while she remained married to Roy), and eventually Bernice’s suspicions that Roy was unfaithful and spending all the family’s money on other women. Eventually Roy moved out of the family home to a smaller house several miles away. But the issue that pushed the marriage over the edge was neither infidelity nor money problems: it was Charles Taylor.

  In late 1989 Chucky’s father reappeared halfway across the world. He was no longer an angry student activist but a smooth-talking and charismatic face of an inscrutable war in the jungles of Africa. Bernice and Roy’s instincts told them to distance their son even further from him. In the weeks after Taylor launched his first assault into Liberian territory, the couple brought the child before a family court judge and asked to change his name. He took the name of the man who had raised him, Roy Belfast. The name didn’t take, however; few called the boy by any other name than “Chucky.”37

  Taylor, meanwhile, had not forgotten his American son. A year or two later, as Bernice recounts the story, she returned home one day, and Chucky told her, “My dad called.”38

  Something in his voice told her that he wasn’t referring to the man who had raised him. But she could only ask her son, “Who’s your dad?”

  2

  Reunion

  Doctrine stitched to my mind, while the wisdom from the wars stay stuck to my spine, taught to fight in conditions be it day or night.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4

  More than a century earlier, on a mid-December afternoon in 1871, the Edith Rose moored in Monrovia.1 It was a black-hulled trading barque out of New York, with sixteen sails drawn from its three towering masts. It carried 243 Americans on a journey to start a new life in Liberia. The nation’s half-century-old capital sat hard on a peninsula of bone-white-sand beaches and belled palm trees, which formed a natural barrier between the Atlantic and the wetlands of the Mesurado River. The ship arrived at the height of the region’s dry season. An equatorial sun hovered brightly in the sky, obscured only by swiftly moving packs of low silver clouds. The landing of the Edith Rose was like the many others that had preceded it since the settlers first arrived in 1822, but it remained distinct in that those aboard were fleeing not slavery but the violent prospect of living as free blacks in the American South.

  Liberia’s creation story had begun centuries earlier, when it existed only as a vast territory situated just above the equator, between four and eight degrees north latitude along the Atlantic coast. This territory stretched outward from the swampy Atlantic coastal plain into rolling green hills ringed by mist, toward an interior of more than twelve million acres of dense rain forest, eventually rising up into a range of gray, cool mountains and highlands near the western border. The interior held riches that would increase in value over the centuries: diamonds, timber, iron ore, and rubber. Eventually two colonies would draw boundaries around it: Sierra Leone, an English possession, to the north, and Ivory Coast, belonging to the French, to the south. The territory was the ancestral home to nearly sixteen indigenous tribes, speaking as many languages; some had hunted and fished along the shores for millennia, while others had migrated across the Sahel through Mali and Guinea. But until the first Europeans arrived in the late fifteenth century, this mysterious, verdant inland expanse was to them little more than undiscovered, uncharted, and dangerous territory.

  The first European contact on the Liberian coast occurred when a Portuguese explorer named Pedro de Cintra came ashore in approximately 1461.2 De Cintra immediately discovered a valuable commodity: an abundance of melegueta pepper, which the locals used to season food. He also encountered an insurmountable language barrier with the indigenous tribes who lived along the coast. As a way to document his discovery, the explorer kidnapped a tribesman and brought him back to Lisbon, hoping this man would elaborate on this strange and unknown land to geographers there. The journey north did little to make the two men more comprehensible to each other, and after the ship arrived in Lisbon, the geographers fared no better in understanding the tribesman. After some time—and with the help of a slave woman—their interrogations were finally able to reveal one fact of this unexplored land: it was home to unicorns.

  But the market was for slaves rather than unicorns, and a slave trade soon flourished along what became known as the Grain Coast, after the grains of the melegueta pepper. Over the next two centuries, the coastal tribes became not only fluent and experienced providers of slaves to Portuguese and Spanish traders but also seasoned combatan
ts in the internecine wars that came with competition in the trade.

  Slavery would also connect this territory to the people of the United States. The American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, or simply the American Colonization Society, saw in this uncolonized region a solution to the legacy of American slavery.

  The society, which fashioned itself a progressive philanthropic group, came into being on December 21, 1816, at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C., where a handful of white American clergy, judges, and congressional leaders gathered to plot out a solution to what many viewed as a developing domestic crisis: the growing numbers of free blacks.3 The group provided a nexus for all manner of contemporary beliefs and prejudices about blacks, slavery, and the prospect of the emancipation of American slaves. Abolitionist members of the group viewed slavery as a taboo, a sinful remnant of the prior generation. Others simply rejected the idea that freed slaves could live alongside white Americans, enjoying the same rights of citizenship. For them, deportation was the best solution. And some members saw in the emerging crisis of emancipation an opportunity to spread the word of God, or as one of the society’s founders put it: “We should send to Africa a population partially civilized and Christianized for its benefits; our blacks themselves would be in a better situation.”4

  Despite their disparate ideologies and beliefs, the group converged on the same idea: that the best solution to the “problem” of emancipation was a program of African emigration. The idea also found support in black communities in free states but was not universally embraced. When the society’s first ship sailed from New York Harbor in 1820, members envisioned the occasion as the departure of an African Mayflower. But within the manumitted communities, it stirred debate as to whether the path toward true freedom was in Africa or in the United States.

  A half-century later, several years into emancipation and well into the Liberian experiment, when the Edith Rose arrived, the notion of a sovereign black nation on a black continent still had appeal for many African-Americans. The settlers aboard the Edith had set sail from Hampton Roads, Virginia, more than a month earlier, carrying with them little more than blankets, shoes, tools, and farming implements. The ship followed the Gulf Stream for several weeks, braving winter gales until it crossed the equator. Conditions were cramped but livable. Below deck, children attended to their studies in a makeshift classroom, while all the passengers congregated each night to pray and—when the weather allowed—to celebrate the Sabbath.

  The settlers belonged to two companies: the Clay Hill Company from South Carolina and the smaller Georgia Company from Valdosta, the seat of Lowndes County, Georgia. The Valdosta émigrés were led by Jefferson Bracewell, the head of his sixteen-person family, who had left at a moment of extreme tension between blacks and whites, Republicans and defeated Confederates, the civilians and military. Despite—or perhaps because of—the presence of a garrison of the 103rd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops in Valdosta, the area saw violence—including bombings, looting, and murders—long after the Confederacy capitulated. Political violence was an experience that had been shared by the South Carolinians.5 Reverend Elias Hill, who led them, had testified before Congress on the abuse he had suffered after the war at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, which had pushed him to seek a new home in Liberia.6

  Over the weekend of their arrival in Monrovia, the passengers were carried to shore along with their belongings. The women and children of the Edith Rose remained in the capital, while the men boarded eight small boats and made their way up the St. Paul River into the bush toward a settlement called Arthington.

  Arthington was just the type of place the society’s founders had envisioned as a starting point for this program. The settlement lay several dozen miles inland from Monrovia along the St. Paul River; it had been established only two years before the arrival of the Edith Rose. A party from North Carolina had pioneered it on a forested and hilly bank offset from the river.7 The town took its name from its sponsor, Robert Arthington, the hermetic heir to a British industrialist family who had donated one thousand pounds sterling to start the encampment.8 With his gift, the North Carolina company, led by a deacon named Alonzo Haggard, cut a town from the forest, constructing a school, a handful of homes, and, most important, a church.

  The surrounding territory had already been “pacified” over five decades by settlers in a series of armed contests with the local tribes. The first emigrants in 1822 had established settlements on land where the indigenous tribes had lived for generations; within a few years, two of the dominant indigenous tribes, the Dei and Gola, set aside their traditional enmity to form an alliance against the newly arrived Americans.9 The tribes had a shared economic interest that was threatened by the new arrivals: the slave trade, carried on with French and Spanish traders like Theodore Canot and Pedro Blanco. Attacks and kidnappings soon became a hazard of life in the bush for the settlers. Eventually they decided the assaults required a response, and marching into the bush, they overtook a tribal fortress manned by fighters from the alliance. The victory stunned the tribesmen, and their alliance soon broke apart. While the Dei would lose strength over time, the Gola would remain antagonists of the settlers for decades.

  In the 1830s and 1840s the government in Monrovia eventually came to support the settlers along the St. Paul River, sending a militia force to suppress the Golas’ slave trade. The conflict had further entrenched the hostility between settlers and the indigenous population, which would persist for generations. Two classes of Liberians emerged: the indigenous tribal Liberians and the settlers, called Americo-Liberians or, more pejoratively, Congo people. With each wave of settlers, the division became more entrenched.

  By the time the Edith Rose landed in 1871, that split was fundamental to Liberian society. Émigrés like Jefferson Bracewell, the elder of the group, first faced the challenge of survival, before confronting the local politics. Bracewell, forty-seven, and his wife, Rhoda, forty, had a family of fourteen children and grandchildren, the youngest a six-month-old girl, Phillis. He was a carpenter by trade and immediately began working just under forty acres of land with his sons, cultivating coffee, cotton, sugarcane, potatoes, and rice. Some of the crop was for their subsistence; the remainder—in particular, the sugar and coffee—was for sale. The Bracewell women tanned leather and assembled clothing, spinning and weaving their own fabric.

  One visitor to Arthington in 1877 traveled through the bush to the settlement.10 After five days, he came upon a two-story wood-frame home, built in an American style, neatly bounded by a fence—a jarring contrast to the thatched native dwellings he had passed on his journey through the interior. The village, now populated with four hundred settlers, sat on a plateau overlooking the forested banks of the St. Paul River. A vast coffee orchard surrounded the town, the hue of the leaves changing from green to yellow. “The view was delightful,” the visitor wrote, “not a blade of grass or slightest appearance of weeds among the trees.” The town had grown to house two schools and three churches, a Baptist, a Methodist Episcopal, and an African Methodist Episcopal congregation, and in that year, twelve new houses had been built. By 1888 the settlers were farming produce for local markets and as much as 100,000 pounds of coffee for export. One uncomfortable fact, not highlighted in the society’s publications, was the settlers’ reliance on coerced tribal labor to maintain their existence.

  Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Americo-Liberian society had become a grotesque mirror of the one the settlers had left behind in the American South. This was particularly apparent in Monrovia, where plantation dress and lifestyles had become the norm among the nation’s elite. “Nowhere else have I seen so large a number, proportionally, of dress-suits, frock-coats, and stovepipe hats as in Monrovia on Sundays or days of celebration.… Town, houses, dress, life—were all reproductions of what was considered elegant in the days before removal,” wrote Frederick Starr, a University of Chicago anthropologist, in 1913.11 />
  It is and always has been the custom for Liberians to speak of themselves as “white men,” while they have considered the natives “bush niggers.” The Liberian has never indulged to any extent in manual labor; he has done but little even in agricultural work. The native has always been considered the natural laborer of the country; socially an inferior, he has been despised and neglected.

  As early as 1858, the new Liberian government was accused of selling tribesmen into bondage to the French as “apprentices.” Even the topography of early-twentieth-century Monrovia reflected this stark distinction between the classes: the Americo-Liberians lived on a peak—literally looking down on the rest of the city’s inhabitants.

  The elite held fast to the vestiges of the American establishment and, in particular, to secret societies, which took root and flourished more quickly than political institutions: the Freemasons, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, the United Brothers of Friendship, and the Sisters of the Mysterious Ten all had active local chapters.12 In fact, the first request to start a Grand Lodge of Masons in Liberia was sent in 1824, nearly twenty-three years before the government was founded. (The nation would become a constitutional republic only in 1847, after the American Colonization Society severed financial ties with the territory.)

  The indigenous culture had its own secret rites. The traditional belief systems of Poro (for men) and Sande (for women) had long relied on secret initiation rites. In the case of Poro, a “bush devil”—a masked figure serving in the role of a priest—presided over rituals, almost completely undocumented, that were said to include cannibalism and human sacrifice. Similar reports of ritual violence would follow the Freemasons in Liberia, who erected a temple atop Monrovia’s Mamba Point. Both societies preserved their secrecy but eventually opened to one another. “It’s a pity you are not a Mason,” one Liberian told a Western researcher investigating Poro. “For then I could tell you more. The Poro is just like Freemasonry.”13 As the notion of political power and influence developed in the young republic, these societies would be instrumental in the lives of the nation’s leaders.