Russell Banks - The Darling

People called me “Monkey Lady,” and sometimes “Madame Sundiata of the Chimps,” and several times I heard myself referred to as “Queen of the Apes,” like a female Tarzan. The first time I heard that one it came from Sam Clement, not long after I finished the renovation of the prison and had completed transferring the dreamers from the Quonset hut, a job that required considerable help from a crew of four strong men, a flatbed truck, and a four-foot-by-four-foot, specially constructed cage on wheels that we used for transporting the adults and larger adolescents. The cage had a sliding door that we opened and placed next to the door of the old Quonset hut cage. We slid both doors open, and one by one, sometimes with the younger chimps two by two, they entered the larger, wheeled cage; then we slid the doors closed, locked and wheeled the cage to the truck and loaded it and drove it out to Toby, where we repeated the operation, releasing the chimps into the cells that in the Tolbert years had been built to hold humans, but which were five or six times larger than the Quonset hut cages. The chimps entered their vast, new space, where I had placed fresh water and food to welcome them and had suspended tires from ropes and built racks of iron pipe for climbing and swinging and cocoa-leaf mats for sleeping nests, and made themselves at home. It wasn’t exactly a minimum-security prison, but it was an enormous improvement over their previous conditions of confinement.

The last to be transferred to his new prison cell — I can’t call it his home —was Doc, who must have felt, as he saw his troop diminished one by one, that we were executing them one by one, for as each left the Quonset hut, he grew sadder and more downcast, until at the end, when we came for him, he lay curled in a corner of his cage, a huge, dark hill of depression, as if prepared for burial. But at Toby, as soon as we removed the wheeled cage from the truck and pushed it up to the open door of the cell that was to be his, which was located at the command center of the block and from which all the other cells were visible, he stood and looked out at his troop — his subordinate males and his female consorts and his children and their playmates and companions — and grasping the bars of the cell, he shook them with spectacular delight and display, as if he himself had arranged all this and it had gone precisely according to plan.

I was feeding the dreamers, passing large chunks of watermelon through the bars, when I heard a voice behind me. “So you’re the Queen of the Apes now. And this is your palace.” I turned. It was Sam Clement. Our American friend. It wasn’t the first time since my return that I’d seen him; he had been at our doorstep to greet me on my first arrival and had visited the house for dinner once since. But it was the first time that we’d been alone with no other humans present.

Sam smiled and stood next to me and for a moment studied Doc, who studied him back. “That’s a big fella,” he drawled. “What’s his name? I expect you’ve given them names.”

“Doc. Yes, they have names. Though I don’t know what they call one another. Kind of an interesting question, don’t you think? Whether animals have names for one another.”

He laughed. “I suppose they grunt, ‘Hey, you,’ with various inflections and tones and get answered, ‘You talkin’ to me? ’ Hey, show me around, will you?”

I walked him through the prison, and he admired, or pretended to admire, the way I’d recycled the cells and the exercise yard and had converted the old interrogation rooms into storage and had made what had once been a windowless room, probably used for torture or solitary confinement, into a nursery for the babies. As we walked we touched delicately on the subject of his role in facilitating my return to Liberia and the aid and comfort I was now receiving from President Doe.

“Sam, were you keeping track of me through Woodrow while I was in the States?” I asked him. “Or were there other, more official sources of information?”

“Oh, Woodrow kept me posted well enough. Our paths crossed at the embassy every now and then. Say, is it possible to get close and actually touch these beauties?” he asked and took a step towards the cell where Tina and her daughter Belle were happily sharing half a watermelon. From his cage Doc saw him and raised an ear-splitting protest, and Sam backed off. “Whoa! Steady there, big fella.”

“He sees you as competition,” I warned. “He thinks you want his wives.”

“They aren’t my type, believe me.”

“I haven’t really thanked you, Sam,” I said. “For speaking for me. With Doe, I mean. I assume it was you who brought him around.”

“Yes, sort of, but he didn’t need much convincing. The guy he’s pissed at, and damned afraid of, too, is Charles Taylor.”

“Oh,” I said and changed the subject. “Actually, if you want, you can play with the babies. In the nursery. I’ll bring them in for you. They’re still a little frail, but quite gentle and sweet.”

“No, thanks. Not for me. I’m a people person, if you know what I mean.”

We’d ended the tour at the front of the sanctuary, where I’d taken over the prison chief’s office. It was a large, bright, freshly whitewashed room furnished with a desk and filing cabinet, where I’d started combining as much of the data left over from the old lab with the data that I was now accumulating, birth, medical, and behavioral information, along with a rapidly swelling file of correspondence from primate sanctuaries in other countries, mostly African, but also a few located in the United States, in Ohio, Georgia, and South Carolina, and one in Canada. I was finding allies and teachers everywhere.

“Well, m’love, I ought to be getting back to the office,” Sam said. Out the window I saw his Land Rover with the U.S. seal on the side. His driver was chatting with several of the men I had hired to help me move my dreamers to their new home. “You heard about Taylor, didn’t you?” Sam said.

“Heard about him? No. What?”

“He escaped from prison. In the States.”

“He was in prison?”

Sam smiled, that warm, Virginia, white man’s smile reserved especially for silly women. “Yes, Hannah. He was in prison. A federal prison in Massachusetts. Not too far from where you grew up, Hannah.”

“And he escaped?”

“It wasn’t but minimum security, so he didn’t need a hacksaw blade in a cake. I guess he just sort of walked off the place.”

“Where … where is he now?”

He opened the door and stepped into the glare of the yard. “Who knows?”

IN THOSE DAYS, rumors passed through Liberia like weather systems, one following hard upon the other. To me it seemed unlikely if not impossible, but Charles was supposed to have fled the United States for Mexico, not Libya. And from there to Cuba, where Fidel Castro was providing him with military training and sanctuary. Then we heard he was in jail in Ghana for plotting to overthrow the government of President Rawley. Or he’d recently been seen in Abidjan trying to raise money to finance an invasion of Liberia from Côte d’Ivoire. Or he was up in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, making arrangements to invade Liberia by sea. The next week he was in a training camp outside Tripoli, building an alliance between Samuel Doe’s old Americo enemies in exile, a cadre of ex — Black Panthers, and a battalion of young pan-African communist revolutionaries. It went on like that, month after month, year after year. He was said to have gotten married. He was getting divorced. He was said to have become a Baptist. For a month we heard he was in the pay of the CIA. A month later the CIA was trying to assassinate him. And so on, until the only way for me to process the rumors was to discount them altogether, to go about my daily rounds at home and at Toby, and wait.