intellect and education. I believed the roughness of our hands meant something about the rough state of our minds.
Neither of my parents tasted silver growing up, and we were clinging to the edges of the bottom rung of that middle class when I was young, even if they never let me know it. Dad worked up from a maintenance man to union steward and into union management, all without a lick of higher learning.
I blamed mom when dad left her for his secretary; it wasn’t fair, but neither, then, was my understanding of things. I suppose she lost that debate on account of things he’d tell me she wouldn't. Maybe it all centered around that old maxim about familiarity and contempt- I had to live with her, but he just had to find a way to be personable on weekends.
I might have liked a personal revelation, some growth I could claim as my own, for my change of heart. But it came about in conversation. Now, people tend to assume everyone they don’t know ain’t smart; it’s a coping mechanism, I think, to excuse their social failings in lives too busy to give everyone their due (not to say I excuse it, just that it exists).
Mom came home from the mill, as angry as I’d seen her at anyone but my father. Union had negotiated a lemon of a contract, and her idiot coworkers were going to vote for it anyway. As we talked, I realized hers weren’t sour grapes, or watered down by unreasonable expectations; she simply understood what she was worth, and wasn’t going to settle for anything less than that. But it was more than economic arithmetic; her argument was passioned, and smart, with a worldly weight to it. She applied for a job with the school district, instead.
In one afternoon my mother taught me what a life of looking down on the work I did, and being looked down on for it, could not. Work doesn’t define me or my limits. Neither do the fool assumptions of people who don’t know me, or take the time to try to.
Freetown
The name of the city sounds like an ironic euphemism, and if you’re only familiar with Sierra Leone’s recent history, you might believe that. But it began in the late 1700s as a utopian idea- abolitionists and former slaves living together as equals. Of course, the indigenous people weren’t so happy to have this very British form of freedom forced on them, and revolted, but that’s a side issue.
Freetown has always had a complicated relationship with its name. In the 1800s, it served as both the British colonial capital and the seat of their West Africa Squadron- at its height a full sixth of the Royal Navy, dedicated exclusively to abolishing the slave trade. Freed slaves often settled in the city- virtually the only place on the continent where their freedom was assured. The city even served as one of the bastions against the Nazi incursion into Africa during the Second World War.
But it was in 1961 that the British finally gave up Sierra Leone as a colony, on the anniversary of the Hut Tax War of 1898. Sir Milton Margai, the man who saw Sierra Leone through decolonization, died one day after his three year anniversary as Prime Minister; that seems like something to me, but I’ve been accused of paranoia before. Margai’s brother succeeded him, but was corrupt. Siaka Stevens was elected to follow him, but the damage was done, and the country plunged into a series of coups and counter-coups. A year passed with a coup for every season, then the Anti-Corruption Revolutionary Movement restored the government, and allowed Stevens to finally take up his post as Prime Minister.
By the end of a decade, Stevens oversaw the return of the irony to his capital’s name by making Sierra Leone a one-party state under the All-People’s Congress party. Seven years later, Stevens gave power to his hand-picked successor, Major General Momoh. Momoh was weak, and his advisers and ministers pillaged the country’s resources until we often couldn’t afford to import fuel, and had to go without power, sometimes for months at a time.
The Revolutionary United Front launched its first attacks on Sierra Leone in early ’91. Like most any movement, the intellectuals were murdered and replaced with rabid dogs early on. They became notorious for forcibly recruiting child soldiers, for performing amputations on prisoners, for cutting open the bellies of pregnant women, for eating the flesh of fallen soldiers. They cut the rest of the country off from the diamond revenues, crippling the economy. Momoh ended the one-party system, but it wasn’t nearly enough to put a stop to the RUF’s momentum.
After less than a year of civil war, Momoh was overthrown in yet another coup; however, the coup leaders were just as ineffective against the RUF, and their army was driven to the very doorstep of the capital. Mercenaries from the Executive Outcomes firm finally drove the RUF back. By ’96, the coup leaders were pressured into turning over power back to an elected government; in ’97, that government was overthrown in yet another coup. In ’98, an African coalition force reinstated the elected government. In an attempt at appeasement, the RUF was invited to join the government.
Almost immediately, the RUF began violating its peace agreement, even going so far as to kidnap hundreds of UN peacekeepers. Because this town eats up its irony, it was the British, its former colonial masters, that finally ended the civil war, beat back the RUF, and gave the UN force enough room to establish order in 2000.
Now, I consider myself a student of history, enough that I understand the… quandary in quoting Dick Cheney on the subject, but he’s correct: “it’s easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.” For the first time in its history, the city is truly under the command of its citizenry, which in its unique way, brings us to Curran (the Irish lawyer, and not the Muslim holy text), who said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” I’m heartened to see it’s a message not lost on my countrymen; there have been several notable occasions when vigilantes have struck against criminals the authorities would or could not.
And then, my sister was raped and beaten by her neighbor. She insisted on continuing charges, spending a month’s wages to pay the fee for a government doctor to examine her. The doctor found that the semen he left in her was tainted with HIV. Hers was one of the 311 rape prosecutions last year, but not one of the 5 convictions. Instead, she was ordered to marry her attacker.
She was devastated, and I feared she might do something drastic, so I decided to intercede on her behalf. I realized it would have been unethical to deny her husband-to-be his freedom to rape- so I simply removed his motivation. Severe crushing and avulsion (or tearing away) of flesh make replantation surgery difficult if not impossible; suffice to say that these methods were used exclusively. I paused as I stuffed the severed appendage into a baggie, realizing the parallel I’d drawn by using the tactics of the RUF, but I dismissed it; after all, the difference between justice and terrorism is righteousness.
I had spent the previous week preparing. There was a full ten minutes between when I arrived and when the judge returned home. He noticed his broken rear window just as I stabbed him with a needle, and pumped him full of a paralytic agent. He moaned pathetically as I removed his pants.
I’d kept the borrowed organ beneath my arm, hoping to keep its toxins fresh. It was slicked with blood, which, had he the ability, might have made the judge thank me. When it was done, I wiped my blooded hands on his pants.
I closed his front door, not caring if I was seen leaving. The night air was crisp, and I rolled Sartre over my mind: “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” I was certain that, as a judge, he understood that homosexuality in our country was a crime, and that I’d just made him a criminal at the same time I'd murdered him; the thought brought a smile to my lips. This city loves its irony, and so, I must admit, do I.
Two For One
My name is Craig Perdman, which I’ll admit is strange, because Craig Perdman died. I don’t really know the details, and, really, the woman who told me seemed like she didn’t have enough information (or the inclination) to really explain it to me, anyway. But he died at sea, on a trip with his family. He bled out on a boat. I don’t know if I’m sad about that.
Craig and I were fertilized together; our egg divided and split. It’s called poly
embryony, and it’s been nearly forty years since we stole the trait from the DNA of nine-banded armadillos. It’s basically the same thing that happens to make natural twins, but the armadillos do it as the rule, and not the exception, and since then, so do we.
We were born nine months later by C section. There are countless benefits to caesarian, including bypassing some of the complications and less pleasant aspects of natural childbirth (like vaginal tearing). Bur it was twinning that put an end to most natural childbirth. Studies discovered women became less attached to the second fetus if they were never forced to deliver them.
And that was the last time I ever saw Craig; Mom was stroking his head, the doctor handed me to a nurse, and I was taken away. In some of my darker hours, I’ve wondered, if maybe I’d pushed to be the first one out, if that would have been me; but I suspect she chose him from a sonogram, and twin or no, I’d have been found out.
I’ve spent most of my life asleep in a refrigerator; you can call it suspended animation, and you can dub me a human duplicate with accordant rights and dignity, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I’ve spent the last thirty years as a human TV dinner. I was informed