Russell Banks - The Darling

“Palavers?”

“For settling disputes and such amongst the peoples. The village name is Fuama. Fuama is very small, very isolated. Small-small. Only a village. Fuama is about fifty miles from here, three and a half, maybe four hours.”

I couldn’t tell if he was worried more about the impression I would make on his people or the impression his people would make on me, so I said nothing. Reassuring Woodrow was not my strong suit then. He was still too much a mystery to me.

“My father, Duma, he comin’ to receive us,” he continued. “But him want to present us to the chief and to the other headmen, prob’ly. Same for my mother, Adina, and the other headmen wives. Alla them know why we comin’ out,” he added.

“Oh. They do? Why exactly are we coming, Woodrow?”

He turned to me, eyebrows raised above his glasses, surprised by my question. “Well, it’s to tell them of our plans, Hannah darling,” he said, his low-voiced Liberian-English turning subtly British again, almost a patrician drawl.

“Plans?”

“Our plans to marry. So they won’t be surprised and have hurt feelings when they find out about it later. Since we won’t be able to do it in Fuama, and certainly not in the traditional way,” he said.

“I don’t know why not. I can handle that. I might even prefer a traditional wedding,” I said. “But, look, Woodrow, you haven’t actually proposed marriage to me. Not formally, I mean.” I tacked on a small laugh. Keep it light .

“Ah!” he said, as if suddenly remembering. He smiled gently, but his nose and forehead and upper lip were shiny with sweat, as if the conversation were becoming a wee bit uncomfortable. “Yes, well. Yes, I assumed, after our talk the other night—”

“No, no, that’s okay, I assumed it, too,” I said, interrupting. “I didn’t expect you to get down on one knee and ask for my hand, and you can’t very well go to my father and ask his permission. No, it’s okay. I knew what you were saying. And I agree. I mean, I accept your proposal. Consider it accepted.” I didn’t want to make him say what he seemed reluctant or maybe unable to say, but at the same time I wondered what else had I missed all these weeks we’d been together? What other exchanges had I agreed to, other offers accepted?

“Tell me what you mean,” I said. “That we won’t be able to do it in Fuama in the traditional way.”

“Well, you … you’re a foreigner. And there are certain important conditions that a Kpelle girl, that any native girl, has to meet.”

“Conditions?”

“A certain type of education and experience. And it’s … it’s rather too late for you. It would be too late even if you weren’t a foreigner, because a woman learns it as a child, as a young girl. She learns it from her family and her people. She learns it from the older women, and in a special way that’s not known to men. We males, we learn other things.” He was silent for a moment, and his face was shut, as if he were trying to remember the words of an old song. “We … the people, they have societies for this,” he said with slight embarrassment. The societies for the girls and women were called Sande , he explained, and Poro for the men, secret, highly ritualistic associations, a bit like American college sororities and fraternities, I gathered, except that the Sande and the Poro were ancient and engaged the entire community in their rites and governance. They had strict rules and harsh punishments for violators of the rules; they had officers and emblems of office, secret signs and words, and elaborate regalia and ceremonies that the ancestors had established long before the Europeans arrived. Sande and Poro connected the living to the dead, the physical world to the spiritual world, girls to women and boys to men and men and women to each other, and through rite, secret knowledge, and shared belief they organized and facilitated a person’s transition from one state of being to another.

“But that’s not a problem,” Woodrow assured me. “Your being a foreigner and all. Not for me, certainly, because, as you know, I’m a modern man. One of the twi , as the people call us. No, no, we’ll get married in town, in Monrovia, in a proper church way,” he declared. “We’ll have a Christian marriage. It will be fine and good, you’ll see. The president may even come and celebrate with us. He sometimes does that, President Tolbert.”

“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”

THE ROAD, up to now a shaded tunnel through the crowding green jungle, had opened on both sides to the geometrically laid out orchards of a rubber plantation — row after row of tall, high-branched rubber trees protected against wandering cattle and human beings by barbed-wire fencing. At each tree a man in tattered shirt and loose pants stood tapping latex into a white plastic tub, as if collecting his winnings from a casino slot machine.

“Firestone,” Woodrow said. He sucked his lips for a moment and stared out the window. “Everybody from here and people from far away works for them now. Good money, best they can get.” He paused and examined his carefully manicured fingernails. “But the people, they got to buy food now, instead of growing it. Even rice. A big problem,” he said, his brow furrowed with worry. “Big-big problem.”

Woodrow’s politics, like those of most educated Liberians, were conflicted. He was all in favor of President Tolbert’s so-called Open Door policy of making it cheap and easy for foreign, especially U.S., companies to acquire monopolistic, long-term leases to vast tracts of land and ownership of everything on and under it, avoiding taxes and tariffs, unions, and regulations on wages and working conditions. But he was aware of the price being paid by the natives.

“It’s the fastest way to civilize the tribal people,” he went on, switching back to town talk. “And this country is mostly tribal people, you know. The foreign companies build schools for the children of the workers and make bush hospitals and company stores for them, so the workers will leave their villages and live close to the plantation.” He paused. “And they help our balance of payments. Something the Peace Corps does not do,” he said, smiling. “And it brings hard currency into the economy.”

Right, mainly in the form of bribes, I thought, but did not say — payoffs and misdirected foreign-aid funds siphoned into the pockets and secret bank accounts of President Tolbert and his inner circle of ministers and bureaucrats. Nothing trickling down to Woodrow Sundiata, however, whose Ministry of Public Health had little to offer the representatives of foreign corporations and governments and no power to restrict their field operations. Once the necessary under-the-counter payments were distributed in Monrovia, the companies were free to loot whatever they wanted from the land — rubber, citrus, rice, cocoa, and in recent years a small but growing quantity of diamonds. With Liberian government collusion and assistance, they rounded up and, on contract, hired tribal people and made them into indentured workers, paying them a dollar a day to help extract the raw materials, and then processed what they’d taken and sold it abroad at a colossal profit. Sometimes they shipped and sold it right next door — rice to Guinea, flour to Sierra Leone, powdered milk to Côte d’Ivoire. They even peddled Liberia-grown crops back to the Liberians themselves, dumping foodstuffs at inflated prices for credit or cash on the Lebanese and Indian traders in Monrovia, who in turn marked up and distributed the goods to every small shop and market in the land.

This troubled Woodrow and depressed him. He explained that his father, Duma, who owned many farms, on instructions from the village headman had leased the land under his control to a Norwegian company that insisted he plant nothing but rice on it. In the evenings, Duma’s four wives cooked rice that had been grown and harvested on Duma’s land, carried in bulk by truck to Monrovia, shipped to Nigeria for bagging, and sent straight back to Monrovia, where it was purchased for cash at the village shop in Fuama by Duma’s wives at a triply inflated price.