I know now, of course, what was happening to me, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I had thought I was on a secret guilt trip, a return visit to the scene of my crime. One of my crimes. It was sunstroke and dehydration and hunger, but to me it was a vision. And here it came, a huge wave rising in front of me and then breaking and falling over me, shoving me to my knees, bending my body into an A, a wave replaced by a second, still bigger wave, and a third and a fourth, rolling me over, their enormous weight and force pummeling my body to the ground.
I lay on my back and looked up at the silhouette of a black, featureless head blocking out the sun. It was the large, gray-splotched face of Doc — who had been both the fiercest and the gentlest of the dreamers and the most intelligent — staring down at me in rage, a monstrous Caliban. He opened his mouth wide and bared his large canine teeth. The others, male and female alike, adults and offspring, all the dreamers, gathered beside and behind Doc and watched him intently, as if waiting for him to give the signal that would free them. Free them to do what? To rend and disembowel me and devour my raw flesh? It’s what I expected. It’s what I thought I deserved.
I crouched against the muddy ground and extended my hands in a pathetic gesture, as if to fend them off. They had come forward from the spirit world with no other purpose than to avenge themselves on my stringy, old lady’s body, to tear my hair from my scalp and toss bloody handfuls of it like gobbets into the air, to scream bloody murder and spit into my face. These were my imaginings. It’s what I must have desired. For years, since my youth, hadn’t I been seeking exactly this? The freeing of the slave, the resurrection of the slain, the revenge of the betrayed and abandoned human and not-human. I’d not been able to become any one of them, and had grown angry and then had slain them, the not-us. Now the not-us had come back to claim blood kinship by returning blow for blow, curse for curse.
And Doc spoke. I heard him speak to me! His voice was low and dark, his accent and intonation West African. He called me by name, Hannah-oh, Hannah-oh, Hannah-oh, he moaned, as if making a mysterious, final, despairing benediction for humankind, for my kind in particular, and he said that I had once made much of him and his clan, and I had fed them and had taught them the names and uses of things that they had never seen before. And when I had let them believe that I and they were kin, I had imprisoned them on this island and had delivered them into the hands of the soldiers, who saw them only as food and viewed the babies of their clan as toys to be sold on the streets.
His large, powerful hand descended towards my face as if he meant to tear my pale mask from the bone beneath. Blackness interceded. And that is the last of my memories of the vision.
UNTIL I FOUND MYSELF with my head lying against the brown thigh of a man who was trickling fresh cool water into my mouth. He must have seen that I was now aware of him, for he tipped my head forward slightly and smiled and brought the plastic jug closer to my lips so that I could drink more easily. There were broad, green mangrove leaves overhead, shading us from the sun. The man was the boatman, Curtis, who had carried me to the island and left me there — permanently, I had thought. But no, there he was, pushing my wet hair away from my face, helping me drink, and speaking softly to me, “You gonna be fine now, Miz, don’ you worry none, you gonna be jus’ fine. Good t’ing I come back f’ you an’ bring water, or by now you in the belly of the crocodiles for certain, Miz.”
He helped me sit up and let me hold the jug myself and drink from it. Then he held his hand out to me. “Gimme more dash now, Miz. The water not come free, y’ know. Nothin’ come free in this country anymore. Not for me, an’ not for you neither,” he said.
WHEN A YEAR AGO I went back to Liberia, I thought it was in search of my lost sons, and found something very different instead. Twenty-seven years ago, however, the first time I went to Africa, it was to Ghana, to avoid arrest and imprisonment or possibly simple assassination in the United States. It was 1975, and I was living with Carol — poor, large-hearted Carol — in New Bedford, as part of a tiny Weather Underground cell made up, as far as I knew, of just me and a man named Zachary Procter.
Zack was actually a mainline Cincinnati aristocrat whom I’d known in the Movement back at Brandeis. He was tall — six-and-a-half feet at least — and slim, with ginger-colored hair, freckles, pale blue eyes with crinkly, premature laugh lines at the corners, and teeth like Chiclets. Zack and I had marched arm in arm at various peace protests at the university, but otherwise we had avoided each other. Perhaps because we sensed that we were too much alike. We could see behind each other’s mask of idealism and ideology the face of the privileged, angry kid who, in the name of peace, justice, and racial harmony, had declared war against the state, the university, and, before long, his parents’ entire generation. The face behind the mask was not a pretty sight. Later, the mask absorbed the face and became it, and for a while at least we weren’t ashamed of what we were looking at. Then, eventually, I guess the mask got peeled away, and we saw our true faces again.
Zack’s major was anthropology; I was pre-med. It was the mid-1960s. In our dorm rooms we listened to folk music, Negro blues, and jazz; smoked dope; drank cheap red wine from basket-wrapped bottles; and wore black turtlenecks, jeans, and peasant sandals to class, even in winter. We were conventionally ambitious students, however, and worried about our grades and calibrated our final class standing two and three years before graduation. But on our own, outside of class, we read Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre in Anchor paperbacks, loved Godard and Bergman movies and called them “films,” and cultivated what we regarded as morally meaningful alienation from bourgeois society and values. Our forms of rebellion had been handed down to us from the fifties, after all, by the Beat Generation and famous European-café existentialists.
It was a sweet, almost innocent interlude, especially compared to what came later. Zack and I slept together for the first and last time the same night we organized the SANE chapter at Brandeis. At that age, sex is usually part of one’s family drama, and at college Zack had a hankering for middle-class black and Jewish girls, anyone not like Mom, and I was attracted only to middle-class black and Jewish boys, anyone not like Dad. As a result, sex between me and Zack was too close to incest to give us anything but anxiety. The next morning we somberly agreed not to do it again, and we didn’t, ever. We insisted that it was nothing personal, and the truth is, it wasn’t.
After graduation, Zack went to Ghana with the Peace Corps, and I went to Mississippi and Louisiana for the first time with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That September I returned to Massachusetts to attend Harvard Medical School, where I helped form the SDS chapter, got myself arrested twice by the Cambridge police for disturbing the peace — committing acts of civil disobedience, we called it, blocking entry to the provost’s office and disrupting military recruiters on campus. Making peace by disturbing it. We hadn’t yet brought the war home. But in 1966, as the Civil Rights and antiwar movements blossomed and exfoliated left, right, and center, I dropped out of school six months before finishing and became a full-time political activist. A year later I was living in a commune in Cleveland, organizing and then running a day-care center for working mothers by day and printing pamphlets and broadsides and the occasional phony ID by night. I wasn’t ever a leader; I was a worker, and it was my point of pride. SDS, and before long Weatherman, had become my university, my employer, my church, my family.