Russell Banks - The Darling

“I did?”

“Yes. You went back to the car and patiently waited for me to return. And when I returned, you didn’t press me to explain. Until now, when we’re nearly back in our world and can speak in private again. We’re back in the world we share. I thank you for that,” he said and reached across and took me in his arms and self-consciously kissed me, as if he thought we were being photographed.

Over his shoulder I saw Richard approach from the shop, carrying meat patties and what looked like bottles of Fanta. I pulled away and said, “Come, Woodrow, let’s have something to eat. I’m starved.” I opened the car door and stepped into the blinding bright sunshine, then leaned back in and said to him, “It’s all right. And thank you for explaining. We don’t have to go back there, Woodrow. Not until after we’re married. And not even then, if that’s what you want.”

He followed me into the sunshine, a broad smile of gratitude spreading across his face. It said, Married! We’re going to be married!

WE FOUND STOOLS beneath a cotton tree and settled there to eat and drink, the three of us. I noticed a group of idle villagers a short distance away who were watching us and said to Woodrow, “Back in Fuama, when the people first met us at the river, all the mothers tried to keep their babies from looking at me. They kept covering the little ones’ eyes. Except for that young woman in the hut, the one with the baby. Did you notice that, Woodrow?”

He shook his head no and went on eating.

“Who was she, Woodrow?”

“Who?”

“The woman in the hut.”

“Just a woman from the family,” he said. “Her name is Marleena.”

“Who is the father of her baby?”

He didn’t look up from his food. “She didn’t say. The father is probably away from the village. Must be working in the mines or some place like that. The young men from Fuama, they stay at the mines and come back only once in a while.”

“Why didn’t she cover her baby’s eyes, like the other mothers did?”

“I don’t know!” he said. “Why you asking so many questions anyhow! Eat your food. You said you were hungry, didn’t you?”

I gave up and did as instructed. But it didn’t matter; I knew the answers to my questions.

For a while we three ate in silence, and then Richard spoke. “You know ’bout Mammi Watta, Miz Hannah?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Mammi Watta. She the spirit of the river an’ all that.”

Woodrow said, “It’s nothing. A story. A bush people pickney story is all.”

“The peoples use it to scare the picknies when they bad and for makin’ them do good,” Richard said.

“Has it got something to do with me?” I asked him.

“No. Nothing at all,” Woodrow said.

“Excep’ Mammi Watta a white woman an’ come from the river,” Richard said and gave a goofy little laugh.

“It’s just that you’re probably the first white woman those little picknies have ever seen, that’s all,” Woodrow continued. “And the mammis all know it’s impolite to stare at people, ’specially grownups.”

“Tell me the story,” I said.

“It changes all the time,” Woodrow said. “And there’s different ways of telling it in different villages. I mostly forget it anyhow.” He stood up and brushed the crumbs from his shirt, finished off his warm Fanta, and said, “All right, we better get moving. I got work to do. And so do you, Satterthwaite.” He looked pointedly at Richard, who quickly got up and headed for the car.

As we neared the car, Woodrow leaned down and in a low voice said, “That boy’s getting to be one uppity nigger. He’s my cousin’s son, but I frankly don’t know if I’ll keep him.”

“Oh, do!” I said. “He’s good at what he does. He’s just a little foolish sometimes, that’s all.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said. He put his arm around me as we walked. “Thank you, my darling,” he said, “for being so understanding.”

“Oh, think nothing of it, Woodrow. We all have our little secrets. Especially women and men.”

“Yes!” he said. “Especially women and men!”

IT WAS PERHAPS a little odd and certainly not characteristic of me, but after returning from Fuama, as soon as I was alone, the first thing I wanted to do was write to my parents. Hundreds of times over the years, I’d wished that I could simply sit down and write them a letter, even a short note — any form of written communication would do, my voice on the page to their ears, calling their fading voices back to me. But I couldn’t. Mostly because it was too dangerous, but also because, as the silence between us stretched into months and then years, it grew nearly impossible for me to imagine what I would write to them. If I ever got the chance to communicate with my parents directly and freely again, where would I begin? Where would I end?

Dear Mother and Daddy ,

This letter comes to you from very far away, as you can see from the postmark and return address. All the way from Monrovia, in the African nation of Liberia! How I got here is a long, complicated story, and I hope someday I can tell it to you. But for now, just know that my being here is what lets me contact you directly for the first time in years. Even though it’s still possible that you’ll never receive this letter or if you do that it’ll arrive already opened and read and copied by the FBI. But you don’t have to worry about that (I think) as I’m more or less safe here in Liberia, and nothing I write to you will be in the slightest incriminating of you, or of me, for that matter. Although I do wish I had a good American lawyer, Kunstler or Ramsey Clark or one of your guys, Daddy, available here to check it out first. Anyhow the point is that for the first time in almost seven years, since my indictment in Chicago, actually, I’m not taking a risk or putting you at risk by writing to you.

When I was underground, a telephone call had been out of the question — too dangerous, unless it were prearranged and placed pay phone to pay phone. In those days, everyone I knew more than casually simply assumed that the FBI was tapping his or her phone. What could my parents and I have said to one another, anyhow, what intimacy could we have shared, knowing that it was being heard and tape-recorded by a pair of government agents eating jelly doughnuts and drinking coffee in a van outside the house? It wouldn’t have been my voice to my parents’ ears or theirs to mine — we’d be too circumspect, too self-conscious and coded. We were nearly that as it was, under the best of circumstances. Besides, in those years our need to communicate with one another directly never seemed quite desperate enough for us to be willing to go all clandestine, as if we were mobsters or Soviet spies. As a result, from the beginning until the end of my underground years, we resisted going through the elaborate dance of setting up calls between pay phones outside a convenience store, one for my parents in Emerson, Massachusetts, the other for me down the block from a safe house in Cleveland or New York or New Bedford. Daddy wasn’t the type to endure that. If it weren’t in response to a verifiable, life-threatening medical emergency, he would have regarded any such arrangement with contempt and as beneath his dignity, even if it meant depriving himself of his daughter’s voice. And Mother certainly wasn’t the type. If she’d been told by me or Daddy that every time she left the house she was followed by an FBI agent, she’d probably have had an old-fashioned nervous breakdown, a paranoiac seizure that would have paralyzed her and sent her to her bed for weeks. I exaggerate, I know, but not by much.

I’ve been out of the States for a while now and therefore haven’t heard anything about Daddy in the news, which in recent years is the main way I kept track of you two, you know, and as a result I’m left hoping but not knowing for sure that you’re both okay, in good health, etc. So I hope you’ll answer this letter with news of home and family. Maybe you should run it by your lawyer first, though, just in case I’m being legally reckless. If you wish, feel free to show it to Mitchell Stephens or Ron Briggs or whoever represents you nowadays, Daddy. I’ve been assured by a friend here — he’s sort of my boss, actually, a man positioned fairly high up in the government — that the Liberians won’t extradite me. I’m working for a blood plasma lab doing research on hepatitis with chimps. Not really doing the research, just supplying and shipping chimp blood to the U.S. It’s sort of a NYU, U.S.A., and Liberia jointly funded operation, and it is interesting work but has gotten stressful for me because of the chimps and what we have to do to them, so I’m not sure how much longer I can work at the lab. I have no intentions of leaving Liberia in the foreseeable future, however, and even if I wanted to, where could I go? Anywhere else and I’d risk being arrested and would have to go underground, which, believe me, I never want to do again as long as I live.