Russell Banks - The Darling

Maybe it was this courting business. Over the years I had been involved with many men — not many, actually, even though it’s the sixties and early seventies we’re talking about here, and my twenties. Numerous , let’s say. And I had believed at least twice that I was in love, once for as long as six months, both times wrongly and inconsequentially. They were crushes, infatuations, fixations, maybe, and there’s no point in my going into detail here. The truth is, I had never really been in love. And, perhaps more important, I had never been courted before. This was new and strange and exciting, and although the process confused me, I plunged ahead anyhow.

I wondered if this was how it had been for my mother and father. “When your father and I were courting…” my mother’s illustrations from her youth frequently began, but when it came to matters of the hearts and minds and men and women and the language used to portray them, I was a pure product of my generation and thus hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about.

Two or three times I’d stopped my mother’s story and asked directly, “What do you mean, ‘courting’?”

“You know, dear, when Daddy and I were first together. When he was in med school and I was still at Smith…”

“What do you mean, ‘together’?”

“Well, dating , I guess. And all that. Getting to know one another. The way one does,” she said, her voice rising. “Before one marries, I mean.” Her eyes darted nervously away from my gaze, as if I’d accused her of having done something disgraceful. “Why are you asking this, Hannah? I was only telling a little story.”

Why, indeed? I knew what my mother meant. I knew my mommy’s language, her silences and euphemisms, her code words and coy abbreviations, knew them better than I knew the language of my friends. My mother was right to feel defensive and angry. I was attacking her. But for what? For her timidity concerning the subject of sex, I suppose. For her placid reliance on words like courting and dating , as if they meant the same to every woman of every age and thus could be used politely under any and all circumstances to conceal as much as they revealed.

I wanted to say, Do you mean when you and Daddy were first fucking , Mother? Is that what you’re remembering at the start of your twenty-times-told tale of the day that he took you to meet his parents for the first time? And while you all sat in the parlor — it was a parlor , not a living room, right? — waiting for the maid to call you to lunch, the three of them, Daddy and Grandfather and Grandmother Musgrave, silently read, Grandmother from her Bible, Grandfather from the Wall Street Journal , and Daddy from a medical textbook; and you, Mother, sat alone on the wide, hard sofa with your legs crossed primly at the ankles and stared at your lap, silenced by the silence of the others, as if the three of them were not reading but were lost in private prayer.

Courting. And now here I was myself dealing with a man in the same way, meeting him for lunch and dinner three and four times a week, talking on the telephone almost daily, giving and receiving little gifts, meeting his friends, and soon, soon, he promised, his family, but plenty of time yet for that. I was dealing with Woodrow Sundiata in a way that I knew could only be called courting.

And we weren’t fucking. We were barely kissing. We held hands when walking along the moonlit beach, but rarely in public, and were held in each other’s arms when dancing at the Mamba Point Hotel or at the several government and Masonic balls that Woodrow invited me to. Mostly, though, we talked, talked to one another, talked in the way that is specific to courtship, speaking at first, as all lovers do, through a mask to a mask — long hours of talk that over time, weeks, months, slowly, atom by atom, transformed the mask of the other into an actual face and made one’s own mask as invisible to the wearer as to the viewer. It was how one lost track of the masks and how one came to know oneself anew. I thought: So this is what it’s like, being in love! I get it. You become a new person! A person unknown.

I told him the story of my life, most of it, a version of it, and he told me his, and in the telling both storytellers came to believe that their stories were true. I’m the person I’m describing , I thought, I really am! I knew that I was editing the story as I told it, but not to hide anything or to protect myself — I believed that I wanted Woodrow to know everything about me, no lies and no secrets that mattered. But I was telling my story to a man, not another woman, and therefore edited it accordingly. And I was revealing what I knew of myself to a black African, not a white American, to a Christian, not an atheist, to a conservative government official, a member of the True Whig party, and not to a neo-Marxist fugitive under indictment by her own government for acts of civil disobedience and suspicion of terrorism. I had no choice but to alter, delete, revise, and invent whole chapters of my story. Just as, for the same reasons, I am doing here, telling it to you.

And Woodrow was doing it, too, I was sure. He was the person he was describing — at least I believed he was, even though he, too, must have been editing his story in hundreds of large and small ways to protect me from my abysmal ignorance of lives like his and to assuage my fears of the vast differences between us. He was doing for me what I was doing for him and now for you. As my mother and father had surely done for each other long ago during those months when they were courting, before they were married, so that when finally they did agree to marry and started fucking, each knew whom she or he was fucking and was confident that the other person did too.

Which is almost how it happened for me and Woodrow. I remember a night in May: Woodrow and I were returning from a policeman’s ball at the huge, yellow-brick Masonic temple at the center of the city. There had been a considerable amount of drinking and hearty male laughter at our table, which was not the head table, of course, where President Tolbert and his half-dozen closest ministers and their large, tulip-shaped wives had sat, but close enough to it for me to gain a considerable amount of favorable attention from the important men. That night, Woodrow proposed marriage to me.

Not exactly proposed marriage, but I knew it’s what he meant, and I didn’t exactly accept, but he knew what I meant, too. We were in the back seat of the Mercedes, with Satterthwaite driving, as usual, watching us in the rear-view mirror, as always. Woodrow was uncharacteristically voluble. He was happy and a little drunk. All evening long, from the tone and tune of the greetings he’d exchanged with the big men — from President Tolbert himself to the American ambassador to the chief of police — and from the way the big men had so politely flirted with me, it was becoming clear that Woodrow was about to enter the next inner circle of power, where at the center the president stood alone. And far from hindering his progress towards that center, the young, white American woman — whose past was known among the Americo-Liberian community to have been “adventurous” and possibly even a little politically dangerous, especially for a woman, the woman named Hannah Musgrave, whose passport still had her name as Dawn Carrington — that woman was in fact an obvious help to him. In that circle I glamorized the otherwise dull and officious little assistant minister of public health, for I knew that’s how they viewed him, as one of the cadre of boring, competent, American-educated bureaucrats whom the president used to keep the government running and the Americans happy. Woodrow was one of a contingent of Liberians whose business would have been business had they been of Lebanese or Indian descent or Mandingo, but because they were black Africans of at least partial African-American descent, their business was government.