“So you understand that by now they’re either with one of Prince Johnson’s outfits on the other side of the river or else with one of Charles Taylor’s.”
“Yes.”
“More likely Prince Johnson’s. Charles’s people are still pretty much locked down at Robertsfield for the time being. Johnson’s just over the bridge.”
I nodded. I understood what was happening, I was living inside it; it was my life, but I couldn’t quite believe that it was real. I asked Sam if he had moved Woodrow’s body.
“Yes. I dug a shallow grave out there in back of the house. It’s in the flower garden. When this is over, you can put together a proper funeral for him. I’ll show you later where I buried him.”
“You found … the head, too?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Sam, what am I going to do? What can I do?”
He took a swallow from his drink. “Only one thing you can do now.”
“What?”
“Get the hell out of Africa.”
BUT I DIDN’T LEAVE. For a while I was able to continue searching for my sons and caring for my dreamers. There was murder and mayhem all around me during those weeks, but strangely very little of it touched me directly. At least at the time it seemed strange. Later, I understood.
Every morning I drove through the nearly deserted streets of Monrovia, passing bodies, many of them mutilated and half devoured by dogs and other scavengers during the night, with smoke rising from the outskirts where fighting continued between Doe’s dwindling forces and Prince Johnson’s bands of men and boys in the eastern suburbs. Charles Taylor’s forces were approaching from the south. Rumors of Doe’s imminent collapse and surrender floated through the city like errant breezes. There were hourly radio broadcasts and declarations of victory by all three parties to the war, each of them in turn denying the claims of the other two, until it became impossible to gauge the direction or flow of the conflict. Because I seemed to be immune to its effects, of so little value or threat to any of the warring parties that I was able to pass through the checkpoints more or less at will, I was able to ignore the daily advances and retreats and dealt with the war as if its outcome would have nothing to do with me or my sons or my dreamers. I was too numb with fear and grief, too horrified and shocked by the killing of Woodrow and my sons’ disappearance, to worry about the larger effects of the war.
And so I moved more or less freely throughout the city, while the war raged around me. There were checkpoints all over now, run by boys not much older than Dillon, heavily armed and wearing looted clothing and gear, bizarre combinations of women’s clothes, formal wear, and shirts and shorts plastered with the logos of American sports teams. They wore juju amulets that were supposed to make the boys bulletproof and heavy gold chains and medallions that made them look like deracinated rap singers. Regardless of the time of day or night, they were high on drugs and raw alcohol, their minds deranged by what they had seen and done in the war. At every stop they demanded money from me, and as soon as I gave them a few dollars, they let me pass. Every time I saw a new group of boys coming towards my car with their guns cocked and their hands already out for money, I asked them if they knew the whereabouts of the sons of Woodrow Sundiata, and usually they cackled and laughed at my question, as if I’d asked if they knew the whereabouts of Michael Jackson, or they ignored my question altogether, took my money, and waved for me to go on.
Finally, I gave up searching the city for my sons, and decided to risk driving to Fuama, where I half believed they might have gone, although I couldn’t imagine why. I left Kuyo in charge of the dreamers. He had grown to love them and they him. A few times the soldiers, Doe’s men, had come by the sanctuary to see if I had left yet, and when they saw that I was still in charge of the place, they departed, shrugging and smiling over my foolishness. Except for the bodies of the dreamers themselves, bush meat, there wasn’t much to interest them at the sanctuary, nothing of value to loot or destroy. Estelle, Woodrow’s sixteen-year-old cousin, a sweet country girl who’d come to the city to work for me at the sanctuary, was as loyal as Kuyo to me and the dreamers and had stayed on at Toby long past the time when she should have fled back to her village. When she first arrived from the backcountry, I’d given her an unused room at the sanctuary, an old storage shed, that she had made her home, and I’d begun teaching her to read. She was a pretty, shy girl, not as bright as I might have liked, but kind and eager to please.
For a long time, she and Kuyo and the dreamers had been my only companions, and because I seemed almost magically protected against the depredations of the soldiers, Kuyo and Estelle had come to think of me as their protector, and thus both had stayed on longer than they should have. Everyone in Monrovia had a tribal village they could flee to, but no one knew for sure if it was safe there. Tribes thought to be loyal to Taylor, like the Gio, were viewed by Doe’s men and Johnson’s as the enemy and were therefore legitimate targets of opportunity, even though they were unarmed civilians. Tribes thought to be loyal to Doe or Johnson because of lineage, were slaughtered by the soldiers of one or the other or both of the others, the women and girls raped, their villages razed and rice and cassava and garden stores looted or burned. All over the country, people were in confused flight from one or the other of the three forces, and sometimes from all three. When the fighting had been mostly in the bush, people had fled into Monrovia; but now it had come to the outskirts of the city, and everyone who could had fled back into the bush. Monrovia seemed like the still center of a swirling, countrywide storm, with all its inhabitants waiting, heads lowered, hands tied behind their backs, for the three armies to converge there.
THE ROAD TO FUAMA was littered with abandoned cars and pickup trucks, tires stripped, hoods and trunks open, some of the vehicles still smouldering. The rubber plantations and plowed fields were empty of workers and overgrown, neglected for months now, since Charles’s band of rebels had crossed into Liberia from Guinea at Nimba and Johnson had come in from the north. The villages all seemed to have been abandoned by the inhabitants, and most of the buildings had been burned. Desolation lay all around.
At the river I was met by a group of four boys, two of them carrying AK-47s and bandoliers of ammunition draped over their bony shoulders. They wore do-rags on their heads and cheap wraparound sunglasses that made them look like spindly insects. When they approached the car, I opened the window and said that I wanted to cross the river to Fuama.
They didn’t answer. One boy held out his hand, palm up, and I put a dollar in it. The others did the same, and I put a dollar in each hand and said again that I wanted to cross the river to my husband’s village. I noticed a man, also in sunglasses and wearing a do-rag, camo shirt, cargo pants, and Timberland boots, lounging by a cotton tree nearby, smoking a cigarette and barely watching the boys under his apparent command. Though I had many times over the years made this journey to Fuama with Woodrow and had come to know most of the inhabitants of the settlement, at least their faces, these boys and their commander were strangers to me. Many of Woodrow’s people did not speak English, or spoke it only a little. Perhaps they don’t understand me, I thought.
The man got up slowly and strolled towards the car. I said to him, “My husband is Woodrow Sundiata. His father is headman of Fuama. My sons—”
The man cut me off. “Go home now,” he said. He waved the barrel of his gun in the direction I had come. “Turn and go home.”
Something in his voice was familiar. “Do I know you?” I asked. “What’s your name?”
“You know me.” He took off his sunglasses, and I recognized him at once. It was Albert, Woodrow’s nephew, who had guided me into the village years ago, on my first visit to Fuama, when I’d been left behind, a teenage boy who was in missionary school and hoped to follow Woodrow’s example in life. And indeed he had, or so I believed. He had finished high school in Liberia and, at Woodrow’
s expense, had attended business school in Baltimore for two years and had returned to Liberia, where he had taken a job in Loma, up near the border of Sierra Leone, with an American-owned sand-and-gravel company.
“Albert!” I cried. “I’m so relieved it’s you.” His eyes were red rimmed and his expression was cold, utterly without feeling. “You’re a soldier,” I said.
“Everybody makin’ war now. You g’wan home now, missus,” he said and put his sunglasses back on.
“Albert, my sons … are they here? In Fuama? Do you know where they are?”
For a moment he said nothing. He turned to the boys with him and spoke rapidly in Kpelle. They answered with slow shakes of their heads. Then Albert said, “Mus’ be them dead. Most everybody from the family dead now. On account of Woodrow an’ Doe.”
“Woodrow is dead, Albert.”
“I know that.”
“He’s your uncle. Don’t you care?”
“I care, yes. But now everybody in the family, the whole village almost, they dead, too. On account of Woodrow bein’ for Doe an’ against Taylor.”
“It was Doe’s men who killed Woodrow,” I said. “Not Taylor’s.”
“Don’t matter who kill him.”
“No, you don’t understand!”
He started to walk away at that, but I got out of the car and followed him down to the edge of the river, where he stood looking across to the landing on the other side. The river was high from the rains and dark red with runoff from the highlands. “The raft is gone,” I said. “How do you get over to the village?”
“The village gone, too. The soldiers, them come an’ mash it all up. Burn all the houses, kill all the peoples inside an’ shoot the ones who run out.”
“What soldiers? Doe’s?”
“Charles Taylor’s soldiers. He come here with them and help to kill all the people himself. Then he goes on the radio an’ says it a great victory over Samuel Doe’s army boys. But there ain’t none of them here. Never was. Only old men an’ women an’ little babies here. When I hear Charles Taylor on the radio I came very fast from Loma to see what happened. Only these little boys left. Them an’ me, we been buryin’ all the dead peoples.”
“Where did you and these boys get the guns?” I asked him.
“Prince Johnson. He got plenty-plenty guns for people who wants to go against Charles Taylor while Prince an’ his soldiers goes against Samuel Doe in the city.”
We stood side by side in silence. He was a small, frail-boned, young man—like Woodrow a decade ago, before alcohol and middle age thickened him. “Albert, what will you do now?”
“Can’t say. ’Cept to keep killin’ peoples. Till Taylor an’ Doe both dead or run out of the country. Prince Johnson give us plenty protection. Nothin’ can hurt us. No bullets, no machete, nothin’. He promise me a good job after the war an’ a house in the city. My war name ain’t Albert, y’ know,” he said. “No more Albert Sundiata,” he said with pride. “My war name is Sweet Dreams Gladiator. Pretty cool, eh?” He smiled broadly, boyishly. Then, still smiling, he said to me, “I need your car. Woodrow’s car.”
“My car? No!”
“We need to take your car. This Benz belongs to Prince Johnson now and no more to Samuel Doe.”
I argued, I protested, I begged, but it did no good. He’d gone stony on me. The boys had crowded into the car, ready to travel, pushing and punching one another playfully, as if headed out for a day at the beach.
Albert said, “Gimme the keys.”
“No! If you take the car, how will I get back?”
“Not my problem. Gimme the keys now.”
We stood there arguing a moment longer, when one of the boys walked over with the keys dangling from his fingertips. I’d left them in the ignition. He handed them to Albert, Sweet Dreams Gladiator, and that was the end of our argument. Albert headed for the car, and I said, “You’re not leaving me here,” and ran for the passenger’s side, flung open the door, and yanked the boy sitting there out of the car and took his place. “There! Now get in back with the others if you want to ride,” I said to him and locked the door.
Albert laughed and got behind the wheel, while the sour-faced boy fought for a place in back, where the others were jammed together with their guns and ammunition. They were little more than children, twelve and thirteen years old, one minute killers, the next playful and innocent-seeming as puppies. Albert said to them, “Better do what Mammi say, before she put the eye on you.”
WE PASSED THROUGH the town of Millsburg to the far side of a cinder-block school, where several troop carriers and seventy-five or a hundred men and boys and a small number of women and girls loitered around campfires. It was nearly dark. I smelled food cooking—palm oil, rice, and meat. Albert parked the Mercedes next to a vehicle I recognized, a white Land Rover with the seal of the U.S. government on the door and U.S. embassy plates.
Immediately, a gang of fighters surrounded the Mercedes, admiring it and praising Albert for having brought it in. He turned and said to me, “Maybe I can get you a ride back to town.” He nodded in the direction of the Land Rover, then got out of the car. “Wait here. I’ll bring Prince to decide things,” he said and walked into the school with most of the crowd in tow.
A few moments later they returned, with Albert still at the center but walking a few feet behind a tall, very dark man in a proper military uniform, Prince Johnson, evidently, and striding along beside him, Sam Clement, his face barely concealing a sly smile.
I got out of the car and stood by the door, waiting. Johnson had the look of a successful preacher, a crowd-pleasing, handsome, back-slapper happiest when surrounded by admirers and impossible to imagine alone and in a reflective mood. He came straight to me and took my hand in both his huge hands and said, “I mus’ tell you how sad I am for the cruel an’ untimely death of your husband. I only jus’ now heard about it from my good friend, Mister Sam Clement. Please accept my heartfelt condolences, missus.”
I stammered a thank you and glanced at Sam, whose expression told me nothing at all. Johnson continued to talk. His English was very good, and he thanked me on behalf of his people and all the people of Liberia for the gift of the Mercedes, which had been bought and paid for by the poor people of Liberia and was now being returned to them, its rightful owners, and I could be sure that when this war was over there would be a proper public tribute to me, full government honors and privileges to be granted to me before all the citizens of Liberia. “We Liberians love the Americans,” he declared. “An’ we remember all their many generosities.” Then he moved close to the car and swung open the driver’s door and leaned in, examining it with obvious pleasure.
Sam came up to me and took my arm and in a low voice said, “Get in my car, I’ll take you back to town.” He walked me around to the passenger’s side of the Land Rover and opened the door. I climbed inside and waited while he exchanged a few words with Johnson, who now sat proudly behind the wheel of the Mercedes. Then Sam was beside me in the Land Rover, and we were driving very fast out of town, heading towards Monrovia.
For a long while neither of us spoke. Finally I said, “What were you doing there?”
“More to the point, darlin’, what were you doing there?”
“I had no choice. They wanted the car.”
“I mean, what were you doing way out here in the bush, for heaven’s sake?”
“My sons, Sam! My … lost boys. I thought maybe someone in Fuama would know … and would help me. Would help me find them and bring them home.”
“Ridiculous. All the Kpelle have scattered into the jungle or headed for the border. Except the ones who’ve signed on with Johnson. Like your young friend there. One of Woodrow’s people, no?”
“Yes. Albert. All he wants to do now is kill people loyal to Doe or Taylor.”
“He’s got reason.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Hannah, give it up,” he said. “Don’t go looking any further for your sons.”
> “I have to, Sam.”
“They don’t want to be found. Believe me, I’ve asked around. The sons of Woodrow Sundiata, they’re well known, Hannah, and they’re either under the protection of that crazy sorry-ass Johnson, or Taylor, who isn’t much better.”
“They could have been back there, back at Johnson’s camp?”
“Exactly. And if they wanted you to find them, darlin’, you’d find them without looking. They know where you are, m’dear.” He was silent for a moment. “If you won’t leave the country, Hannah, and I can’t force you to leave, then for God’s sake stay at your house. I’ll make sure it’s secure. We’ve hired some locals to protect certain properties from looting and certain individuals from harm. But if things keep getting worse, we’ll have to close down the embassy completely, and if we do, I won’t be able to help you, Hannah. You’ll be on your own here. A white woman all alone in hell.”
“Who do you think will win the war, Sam?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Taylor. This guy Johnson is nutty as a fruitcake, a real piece of work. But Taylor, him we can deal with.”
“I’ll be all right then.”
Our route back to town passed near Toby, and I asked Sam to let me stop at the sanctuary for a moment to check on my dreamers. With things falling apart so fast, I couldn’t be sure of Kuyo’s and Estelle’s willingness or ability to cover for me. When we pulled up in front of the office, the place was dark, and no one came out of the building to greet us. The headlights of Sam’s Land Rover flooded the small yard, and long, fluttering shadows from the cotton tree in the center of the yard flashed across the gravel. While Sam waited in the car, I walked quickly to Estelle’s cabin and knocked on the door and called, “Estelle? You there?”
No answer. Returning to the car, I said to Sam, “You go on. I’ve got to feed and water the chimps. I think my helpers have run off.”
“How’ll you get home?”