Russell Banks - The Darling

Woodrow’s family pride was much greater than mine. It colored his every reference to them, and I envied him that pride. I admired it. I wanted it for myself. “Woodrow,” I said, as he reached across me to open the car door, “would you like to stay with me tonight?”

I had startled him. He blinked, frozen in mid-reach. I’d startled myself as well. Where had that come from? I hadn’t once, all evening long, thought of sleeping with him. I’d enjoyed attracting him and was aware that the attention I’d received from the big men at the head table had aroused Woodrow, but making love with him? Now? It had not crossed my mind. This was not usually the case — for no other reason than because he was an African, I actually thought Woodrow sexually unusual, let’s say, and wondered almost constantly what he would be like in bed. Tender or rough? Gentle and generous, or harshly demanding? Knowledgeable of a woman’s body or, like almost every man I had slept with so far, woefully ignorant of it?

He was a small man, small hands and feet, small ears. I liked small men.

“Well, yes, of course,” he said. “Of course. Yes, I would like to stay with you tonight. But, no. No.” Then, regaining his balance, “It’s not the right time, Hannah darling. Not yet. I don’t mean to seem a prude, you understand. Or to suggest that you’re not desirable to me. Quite the opposite. No, it’s just—”

“I am really embarrassed,” I said, interrupting. “I guess … well, I thought that was what was on your mind.”

He laughed, affecting the big African man’s deep, dark laugh. “Always! Always! But first things first. As you Americans say. Hannah, I want you to meet my people. Then … then we will be free to follow our desires.” He chuckled the Englishman’s chuckle.

“Is that customary?” I asked him. “Do you usually have your family meet a woman before you sleep with her? Am I being too frank, Woodrow?”

“No, not at all, not at all. Not too frank at all. It’s only the American way of speaking, isn’t it? I like the American way of speaking, even in a woman. But in answer to your question, you are the first woman I have invited to meet my people. Remember, I’m inviting you to meet them, not inviting them to meet you. I’m my own man, Hannah, not theirs. This meeting is for you. For you and for me. Not them.”

He pressed the door handle, and Satterthwaite opened it wide for me to exit. Woodrow kissed my hand, as had become his custom by then, and smiled sweetly, and I stepped from the car. “When you have met my people, then we can sit down and decide what we will do next. Together. Goodnight, Hannah,” he said.

“Goodnight,” I said. “I’m sorry, Woodrow, if I misunderstood.” I felt almost bawdy, what my mother used to call “cheap.” I turned away before he could respond, and made for my cabin. The car pulled out onto the road. Halfway across the compound I stopped and watched its taillights fade and disappear and then stood for a long, lingering moment in thick darkness, letting a flurry of images of slow, comforting sex with Woodrow and marriage to him and bearing his children and settling into a permanent life in Africa flutter randomly down, obliterating neat, orderly thoughts of tomorrow and the next day and the next, the mundane details of my daily routine. I was bored by the thoughts of tomorrow and my ongoing days, one by one by one — but, oh, the images of a permanent life in Africa, though they frightened me, they were exciting and made my skin prickle. They signified a future! I hadn’t had a vision of an actual, believable future in a long time, not for years.

A wedge of shadow darted past my ear. A bat. In the distance a dog barked once and went silent, as if kicked. There was a rustling noise coming from the Quonset hut at the rear of the compound, and I started quickly for my cabin. Before I reached the porch steps, a single chimp had begun to pant and hoot, and in seconds another had joined in, then more, and by the time I opened the door of the cabin, the chimps, all of them, were howling and banging against the bars of their cages.

WOODROW ARRIVED AT the compound early the following Saturday, chauffeured in the ministry car by the faithful and ever watchful Satterthwaite. He hadn’t answered my question the night before about what to wear, and I was shy about asking him again, but figured I’d better dress like a proper white lady — a pale yellow cotton sundress, a floppy, broad-brimmed hat, and sensible, low-heeled shoes, purchased in town the day before. Which turned out to be correct. My usual daytime uniform of jeans, tee shirt, and sneakers would not have cut it. It troubled me slightly that, bit by bit, week by week, my African wardrobe was coming to resemble my mother’s collection of resort wear.

Woodrow’s outfit that day resembled nothing from my father’s closet, however. He wore a starched, white guayabera shirt, pale blue Bermuda shorts, brown British shoes and knee socks, and a new pair of round tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Beside him on the seat an old-fashioned pith helmet lay at the ready. Evidently, when a government sub-minister goes to his village, he does not want to be mistaken for a villager.

I got in back and kissed him on the cheek. “You look like a missionary, Woodrow,” I said and smiled: Just teasing, honey . He frowned. I kissed him again.

“You don’t approve?” he said. His frown became a scowl.

“No, I like the look. Especially the eyeglasses. I mean, you seem very… official. For a family visit, that is.”

“Yes, well, in a sense I suppose this visit is somewhat official.”

The car sped along the road, splashing through steaming puddles of water. It had rained earlier, and sunlight flashed like strobes off the overhanging, bright green foliage and fronds. We were headed north from the compound, which was located east of the harbor on the inland edge of Monrovia. I hadn’t been out this way before. My travels in Liberia so far had been strictly limited to the immediate neighborhood of the plasma lab and to the commercial area downtown and west of the city out to the beaches and hotels beyond, where I’d gone solely in Woodrow’s company. Due to the attention I attracted, especially from other white people, and my residual underground paranoia — which I clung to in spite of Woodrow’s assurance that there was no possibility of my being arrested by the Americans or anyone else — I was still wary of traveling about the country on my own.

Pavement turned to gravel, and the brightly painted, air-conditioned homes of the affluent Monrovians, with their close-cropped lawns and iron-spike fences and the occasional security guard on patrol, gave way to one-room roadside shops and small, rectangular, daub-and-wattle cabins, many with zinc or thatched roofs. Manicured lawns and flower gardens were replaced by vegetable patches and burned-over fields ready for planting and long stretches of dense brush, then solid, continuous jungle. Soon the road was red dirt, and there were fewer and fewer vehicles: Chinese bicycles wobbling under two and three riders, handcarts pushed by shirtless boys, and now and then a crowded rattle-trap of a van or mud-spattered pickup headed for the city.

A crippled yellow dog — Satterthwaite refused to slow for it or adjust speed or direction an iota — heroically dragged its hindquarters across the road just in time to avoid being hit. People walked alongside the road, mostly women and girls with babies strapped on their backs and heavy loads of garden crops balanced on their heads. They watched us blow past and, expressionless, as if the Mercedes were weather, turned away from the wake of dusty wind that followed and resumed trudging towards Monrovia and the weekend market there.

“My father’s name is Duma,” Woodrow said. “Duma Sundiata. He’s the headman of his quarter in the village. Not head of the village its ownself, which has a chief, a paramount chief, above the headmen. So some people like to say my father Duma a small-small man.” His voice had dropped a register, and he had slipped into rapid-fire Liberian English, usually with me a sign of easy intimacy. But today he sounded anxious. “But he’s abi-namu ,” he said. “That means he’s a direct descendant of the Kpelle ancestors, and he has many farms and many children, so even the paramount chief of the village thinks very well of him and invites him to the most important palavers.”