Russell Banks - The Darling

Meanwhile, as the boys approached puberty — and they were close enough in age to arrive there more or less together — Woodrow started taking them to Fuama with increasing frequency and for longer and longer stays. They made these trips without me, as I was unwilling to leave my dreamers in the care of others for longer than a day. At least that’s what I told Woodrow and the boys, until they stopped inviting me to join them — happily, it seemed, almost with relief, as if my presence out there embarrassed them. The bamboo wall that separated me from Woodrow’s family and village was cultural and linguistic, not racial or even economic, and I should have been able to scale it and join them on the other side, but I was unwilling, perhaps unable, to do fieldwork on my own family. Woodrow’s people and their world, especially as the boys became increasingly comfortable and knowledgeable there, frightened and threatened me. Consequently, I coped with my ignorance and feelings of exclusion by backing away from that wall, instead of learning how to climb over it, and only increased the distance between me and Woodrow’s people, between me and Woodrow himself, and between me and my sons.

This allowed us to keep deep and wide secrets from one another. Of Woodrow’s village life, whether he had one wife in Fuama or many wives or none, whether he had fathered children there with other women or, except for my three sons, was childless, I knew nothing and did not ask. And of my sons’ tribal initiation, of the secret Poro rites that moved them out of childhood and taught them the ancient ways of becoming men among their father’s people, I knew only that these rites had taken place in the bush and at night and that women were not permitted to inquire about them, a restriction I complied with easily. And though during those years I was no one’s lover or mistress and certainly no one’s wife but Woodrow’s and underwent no ritual initiation or life-changing religious experience, public or private, I had secrets, too. Mine were the secrets of my past: deviancies, as Woodrow surely would have viewed my relationship with Carol and earlier with other women; and brief and furtive sexual dalliances, as with Satterthwaite; and a certain long-held dream of violence against people and institutions and governments that exploited the poor and the weak — a dream that over the years had faded and nearly been forgotten, but that had been called back vividly into service by Charles Taylor. It was my biggest secret. Once again I was caught up in that old fantasy of the imminent arrival of justice. Though I appeared to be a dutiful mother and spouse and the successful manager of a locally famous primate sanctuary, I was underground, again.

FOR A LONG TIME, we heard no more rumors concerning Charles, and I began to fear that something bad had happened to him, that he had indeed been jailed or possibly even assassinated. But then one morning in early December 1989, news came of a formal armed assault against the government of Samuel Doe. It had been launched along the border in Nimba County by a small force calling itself the National Patriotic Front of Liberia and led by Charles Taylor. The second in command was a “strange man” named Prince Johnson, but there was little else known about the group. No one seemed to take the incursion seriously, since it had occurred in the jungle far to the east, some two hundred miles from Monrovia, and this National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the so-called NPFL, was said to number no more than a few dozen poorly armed men.

On December 26, we got word of a second raid in Nimba, this one conducted by a much larger force augmented by men and boys recruited from Butua and Karnplay, the Gio villages out there, Charles Taylor’s mother’s tribespeople. In the papers and on the radio the men and boys of the NPFL were being referred to now as rebels. But the fighting was still taking place in remote villages, and with no reliable firsthand reports available, no one, except for me, took the incursions seriously. Finally, in late February, Doe sent a battalion of his soldiers to Nimba County with orders to drive the NPFL back into Côte d’Ivoire and claimed a few days later to have gone to the front himself to assess the seriousness of the situation. Upon his return, he assured the nation by radio and TV that there was no cause for alarm, for the Armed Forces of Liberia had everything under control, and the rebels were in disarray, fleeing for the border. Within a few days rumors came that Doe had never made it to the front, that halfway there he’d abruptly turned back, trailed by persistent claims that Taylor’s men were protected by special powers, juju charms and magic waters, that the fighters were “gun proof,” and that often in the midst of battle they became invisible.

By April, the rebels had captured Ganta. Around this time, the AFL, Doe’s frightened and disorganized army — in a vain attempt to terrorize the villagers and keep them from providing recruits, food, and shelter to Charles’s rapidly growing force — had started committing atrocities in the distant villages. The rebels advanced with an ease and speed that surprised everyone. Everyone except me. Things were unfolding just as I’d expected. Just as I’d dreamed. By May the rebels had reached Buchanan, and by June they were in the Bong Mines region. Doe kept showing up on television to assure us that his army had suffered no casualties, that Charles Taylor had lost three hundred fifty men in Kakata, his second-in-command Prince Johnson had lost a hundred fifty fighters in Careysburg, and both were in retreat. Which to us meant only that Charles Taylor had advanced as far as Kakata, barely thirty miles from Monrovia, and Prince Johnson was in Careysburg, eighteen miles from the capital.

I did not know what Charles Taylor would become and what he and the thousands of men and boys who followed him would do to the people of Liberia and to my family and to my dreamers. I could not have imagined it. I believed not so much in him as in his rhetoric, which I had welded to the remnants of my youthful ideology and disappointed idealism. And when I ask myself now what I should have done, once I had made it possible for Charles to escape the cage he’d been put in and I had been granted permission by Samuel Doe to return to my husband and sons, to my home, and to the dreamers, I have no answer other than what in fact I did: I came, like John the Baptist, I thought, to prepare the way; or like Mary Magdalen, to welcome him at the gate, and until he came, to do good works: keeping house.

I wasn’t alone in this. As the season wore on, it began to look as though the rebels might actually succeed in overthrowing Samuel Doe. Support for Charles Taylor quietly spread across the country. It didn’t hurt that in July he broke with Prince Johnson, supposedly over depredations and atrocities committed by Johnson and his followers in villages around the Bong Mines near Kakata. Members of Doe’s government, his press secretary, the minister of transport, and some members of the legislature fled the country. There were demonstrations in Monrovia and Buchanan, led by prominent churchmen, calling for Doe’s resignation. All the while, from a portable radio station somewhere in the jungle, Charles was telling us of his progress and intentions, explaining his principled break with Prince Johnson, condemning Johnson and Doe as if the two were in cahoots together, and we all, Woodrow, too, secretly listened and silently cheered him on.

Doe fought back, of course. Many of his more outspoken critics — journalists, academics, churchmen, and even a few government officials — were brutally murdered by death squads, non-uniformed thugs who came out from under rocks at night and left the mutilated bodies of Doe’s enemies on the streets and door stoops to be found in the morning. Violence begat more violence. Single incidents of murder, disfigurement, and torture quickly justified massacres, villagewide amputations of limbs, gang rape, and the forced recruitment of children. Tribal war erupted. Doe’s Krahn soldiers started imprisoning and executing Gios and Manos, and in the countryside Charles Taylor’s and Prince Johnson’s men started killing Krahns, Doe’s tribe, and Mandingos, a tribe that in legal and extralegal commercial matters had long been favored by him. One of Doe’s death squads massacred hundreds of civilians huddled for safety in a Lutheran Church. Another raided a hospital and singled out Gio and Mano tribespeople and slew them in their beds.