Russell Banks - The Darling

There was a small patio at the side of the house, where we often ate dinner, and a master bedroom fit for a Jamaican plantation owner, with a four-poster bed and private bath and French doors that opened onto a flower garden and a second patio, where Woodrow and I sometimes took our breakfast. There was a small bedroom that would soon become the nursery, a bathroom, and two additional bedrooms, and behind the house a servants’ quarters and a laundry and utility room. There was even a gardener’s shack for Kuyo, the part-time yardman — another of Woodrow’s close relations come in from the country for the support and protection of his cousin, uncle, nephew, or half-brother — the deputy minister. I was discovering the age-old Liberian system of exchange between the powerful and the powerless, a form of indentured servitude that more closely resembled slavery than nepotism.

The house had been outfitted with modern plumbing back when the city water system still worked, but the municipal pumping station and delivery pipes and valves had long since fallen into disrepair. Consequently, faucets ran only in a trickle and for a few hours a day, while outside on the street water poured from broken mains day and night. We had electricity and all the usual appliances, a TV, too, but even in those days, when the country was still relatively stable, we rarely had power for longer than three or fours hours a day, usually in the mornings, and relied on kerosene lamps and candles at night, and more often than not we were obliged to cook with charcoal on a backyard tin stove.

To me, it was a luxurious setting, however, almost embarrassingly so, compared with how most Liberians lived. A comparison, incidentally, that I rarely had the opportunity to make — because of Woodrow’s insistence that I account for every minute of my day when he wasn’t in attendance and his use of Satterthwaite as a keeper and spy as much as a driver and bodyguard and his refusal to allow me to go anywhere in the city alone. “You must not forget who you are,” he insisted. “Please, Hannah darling. The wife of a high government official must not be confused with a Peace Corps volunteer.”

The truth is, I had forgotten who I was. That’s what marriage and motherhood had given me: the upshot of the fucking, the pregnancy, the birthing of my sons and their infancy was that I wasn’t more of a woman or less; I was a different woman. You probably think of me as strong and independent, and I believe that I am — now. I was strong and independent when I was young, too, back before I came to Africa. But in the years between? No. Emphatically no. I was different then.

My weakness and dependence on Woodrow and other men — and in time I’ll tell you about them, too — caused terrible pain and harm to many people. To my sons, especially. Who was that terrible woman, and how do I deal with her now? And the chimpanzees, my dreamers — I need to know who betrayed and abandoned them, too. Was it Hannah darling? Was it Dawn Carrington? Was it Scout? Whom must I hate? And what will be the sentence for her sins and crimes?

IT WAS JEANNINE who taught me how to buy groceries at the Saturday market at Congo Square, and how to cook Liberian style with palm oil, peanut, or groundnut oil, with coconut milk and plenty of hot peppers. There wasn’t much meat available that wasn’t tinned — plenty of fresh fish, however, and chicken, and occasionally pork and goat and stringy chunks of beef. I knew all too well, of course, the local habit of eating chimps and monkeys, bush meat — an atavistic throwback to cannibalism, as far as I was concerned. But it wasn’t merely the country people in the distant villages who relished it and offered it up as a special tribute to distinguished guests. The townspeople loved bush meat, too, and considered roasted ape a luxury item, a delicacy. By then Woodrow had come to accept my abhorrence of bush meat — crediting it to my affection for the chimps at the lab and later the sanctuary and perhaps a white American fastidiousness — and ate it himself only when he dined out without me. “It’s actually very sweet,” he said. “Cooked correctly, it’s better than any pork, and no kind of mutton compares. In fact, in Sierra Leone that’s what they call it, ‘spring mutton.’ ”

No, at home we ate jollof rice, rice fufu , coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls. With Jeannine at my elbow, I learned to cook them all. We ate plantains, breadfruit, yams, gari, or cassava mixed with fish or chicken, one-dish meals mostly. Desserts were fruit salads, banana fritters, tapioca pudding, and shredded coconut balls. The gorgeously colored vegetables and plump fruits were always fresh, firm, a pleasure to cut, chop, mix, fry, roast, steam, and chill.

This was a whole new enterprise for me, who’d never paid much attention to cooking or even to shopping for food. Food had always been fuel, already there on the table before me, or if not, then prepared as quickly and easily as possible, and eaten the same way. Nourishment, that’s all. Now, however, it had become an intricately linked sequence of deeply satisfying, sensual, spiritual, and social rituals. In the past, I’d never really cooked, not even when keeping house back in Cleveland, where the preparation and consumption of food and cleanup afterwards were rigorously communal, or in New Bedford with Carol and Bettina — Carol had done all the cooking, actually. I did the cleanup, like a good husband. In the months when I was living alone at the lab compound I’d depended on expensive, Western-style groceries and imported canned goods purchased at what passed for a supermarket, Dot-Dot’s, on Ashmun Street. But after Woodrow and I were married, the marketing became a Wednesday- and Saturday-morning ritual for me and Jeannine that continued for years, long after I was capable of handling it alone. It was one of the few occasions when Jeannine and I stood on more or less equal footing, when I was less than the mistress of the house and she more than my servant. For a long time I didn’t know how much more, and back then, especially when we shopped for food, I thought we were friends.

I remember walking with her to the square, enjoying the beauty of the crowd, the thronged streets, and then, looking for a particular herb or spice, taking side trips down the alleys and side streets to the shops of the poor. I remember putting my face and hands forward in gestures learned from watching Jeannine haggle and gossip with the shopkeepers in the market, who were all women, many of them from outlying villages, at first feeling foolish for it, awkward, inauthentic, somehow condescending, until it became natural and almost intimate.

But how I wished I were invisible. My white skin was a noise, loud and self-proclaiming. It declared my caste and status for all to hear. And I was both hated and envied for it. For a long while, whenever we went to market, hard looks and cold shoulders greeted me. Then, when it became known among the higglers and shopkeepers that I was Deputy Minister Sundiata’s wife, visibly pregnant by the minister, and was in Liberia to stay, coldness alternated with servile deference, as the shopkeepers bypassed the locals in line to serve me ahead of the others. One or the other, hatred or envy, rejection or servility, would have been endurable, on some occasions maybe even desirable, but coming together as they did, they were like a sty in the eye — a cause of pain, but one’s only means of seeing the world.

And it stayed painful, even after I had become a fixture in town, no longer exotic with my brown babies in tow or pushing a carriage. As soon as he could walk, Dillon went ahead hand in hand with Jeannine, while the twins, magical beings to Liberians, lay tucked into the carriage that I insisted on pushing, after the usual argument with Satterthwaite, who was still under strict orders to drive us in the car and wait while we did the shopping. I carried the money, and though Jeannine translated for me — for I understood almost no Liberian English then and even after years of hearing it daily got lost whenever native speakers wanted me lost — and did most of the actual bargaining, I did all the numbers, until Dillon decided he wanted to do the calculations himself. And I let him, a proud mamma, for it was his special gift. Early on, it had become obvious that Dillon was precocious with numbers. Good at math, as they say. Though not yet two and still clinging to Jeannine’s hip, he would call out numbers for no apparent reason, “Seventeen! Twelve! Twenty-nine!” And because neither Jeannine nor I could determine the source or meaning of his numbers, we assumed they were random bits, numbers overheard from Woodrow talking on the telephone to someone in the ministry, just meaningless sound scraps that he was repeating for the simple pleasure of it. Until one day I happened to notice that, just before calling out a new number, he would stare intently at the number plate of a nearby parked car, and it dawned on me that he was calling out the sum of the numbers on the plate. He shouted, “Seventeen!” and I looked where he had been looking and added the numbers, five plus seven plus two plus three— seventeen .