The place was crowded with men, most of whom were non-Africans, and a small number of women, most of whom were Africans. We grabbed a table in a corner, and Zack ordered us each a Gulder. When the waitress brought the beers and we’d taken a sip and had visually cruised the bar and hadn’t seen anyone Zack recognized or anyone I was in the slightest curious about or eager to meet, I suddenly, without forethought, blurted out, “I’m splitting, Zack.”
“We just got here. You are weird.”
“No, I mean splitting from Accra. From Ghana.”
He studied me for a moment. “Yeah, well, I kind of figured that’s what was up. You’re ready to cop a plea and go home to Mommy and Daddy. You’ve had that look for weeks, man. I can read it.” He lighted a cigarette, held up his empty Gulder bottle, and waved again for another. “Yeah, no shit. You and Mark Rudd and all the other wunderkinds. You guys bob up at press conferences with famous liberal lawyers at your side after making secret deals with federal prosecutors because you’re worried about turning thirty.”
“I don’t mean that, going aboveground. Besides, I’m already thirty-four. No, Zack, I’m just splitting. Splitting off from you. Going it alone from here on.”
“That’s not your style. There are followers and there are leaders,” he pronounced. “You, you’re a follower, believe me. Bernardine, Kathy, Tom, Bill Ayers, even Mark — I mean, they’re leaders, man. But you, you are not,” he said. “Me neither, if you want to know the truth,” he added and shrugged, as if he didn’t much care.
“Maybe I don’t have to be a follower or a leader. Maybe I can be something else.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“I don’t know. A loner. Myself.”
“A loner!” He snickered. “Yourself. Yeah, well, good luck. It’s a little late for that, I think.” The waitress finally brought him his Gulder, and he unfolded his long legs and stood as if to say goodbye. He paid her, picked up his drink, and crossed the room to another table, where a pair of white kids with matted brown dreadlocks were playing dominoes. Turning his back to me, he drank and smoked and from his great height watched them play.
I started to get up from the table, when suddenly Zack turned and strode over to me, his face red and fisted. “Sit down,” he ordered. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Fine.”
I sat, and he looked evenly past my mask and into my eyes, as if about to confess that all these years he’d been in love with me. Or all these years he’d hated me. Instead, he said, “You’re here on false premises, Hannah, you know that?”
“No shit.”
“No, I mean it. I’m gonna tell you something you won’t like hearing, but if you’re set on leaving you probably oughta know it.”
“So tell.”
“You think you had to get out of New Bedford and leave the country, that you had no choice. You think it’s because you got caught in a stupid crossfire between me and some very heavy black dudes, et cetera, and it was the only way for you to protect Carol and her kid.”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not true.”
“It’s not true? What’s not?”
“No. The truth is, I shot myself.”
“You what?”
“I shot myself. By accident. Did it with my own fucking gun, too, trying to stash it under the seat of my cab.”
I looked away and pretended I hadn’t heard him.
“There never was any black dudes or SLA. Or whatever, Black Liberation Army. I mean, there was, there is, but I never knew them, not personally. I only heard about them from some Weather guys in New York.”
“Why, Zack? Why’d you blame black men?”
“I don’t know. Shit, I guess I thought it would impress you if you believed I was tight with them. I bought the gun in New Hampshire, actually, at one of those roadside guns ’n’ ammo shops, and carried it around in the cab in case some jerk tried to rob me. Then I figured I better learn how to use it, so I drove out to some woods on the other side of Plymouth one night to practice with it. I shot off a bunch of bullets, then got worried about the noise and local cops, so I reloaded the damn thing and when I leaned down and tried to shove it back under the seat of my cab, I shot myself. I guess I forgot to put the safety on.” He shook his head at the memory. “Pathetic.”
“And you’re telling me this now? Jesus, why now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “In case maybe you want to go home, I guess. You know, to Carol. To the States. And the truth is, the longer you’re here, the more guilty I feel about it. So in a way I’m glad you’re splitting. I mean, it pisses me off, but it gives me a chance to sort of clear my conscience.”
“But why did you come to me? When you shot yourself, I mean. Why didn’t you just go to the hospital?”
“I’d bought the gun with a phony ID,” he said and smiled wanly. “I was underground, babe. Remember? Like you.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. I wasn’t angry, that’s certain. After all, he’d given me exactly what I’d wanted and hadn’t dared to ask for. He’d provided me with an excuse to abandon Carol, her child, the New Bedford apartment, my crummy job at Peter Bent Brigham, my sordid and lowly role in the Weather Underground — everything that had become an intolerable burden to me. And along with the excuse, he’d handed me a plane ticket to Africa, a place located as far from my burden as I could have imagined. Here in Africa, I’d enjoyed his protection and advice, and he’d laid his old Africa hand onto my shoulder just heavily enough to make me capable in short order of shrugging it off. And now the dear foolish man was telling me that I was free to abandon him, too. Go on, babe, split. You want to be a loner now? Go ahead, do it. Do it without guilt, without embarrassment, without regret. You’re free, babe, free as a fucking bird.
I should have said, Thank you, Zack, a thousand times I thank you. Instead, I said nothing. I simply got up from the table, turned towards the door, and left my old life and entered a new life, as if walking from one empty room into another.
Chapter II
OR ENTERING A DARKENING SKY. And I was following the sun into it, flying like a petrel out along the westering Atlantic coast of Ghana towards Liberia, a tiny country wedged between Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone, a place I knew not at all, where I had not a single friend or acquaintance to turn to, no old Africa hand to aid and abet me in my flight. I had little more than a man’s name, Woodrow Sundiata. And all I knew of him was that he was an assistant minister of public health in the government of President William Tolbert and had studied business administration in the U.S. and was said to welcome the arrival in Liberia of English-speaking foreigners with medical training of any sort.
Some weeks earlier, as so often happened, I’d found myself alone one afternoon in the NYU lab office in Accra with no work to do. Bored and restless, I’d opened a file folder marked “Confidential” and had cruised casually through a lengthy correspondence on official stationery between a Mr. Sundiata and my Ghanaian employers, along with copies of letters exchanged between Mr. Sundiata and my employers’ American bosses at NYU, including memoranda and cables to and from both employers and bosses concerning the good use to which the directors of the NYU blood plasma lab might put this mid-level West African official who was evidently eager to provide exclusive access to Liberia’s large population of chimpanzees, both in the wild and captive, in exchange for American-trained medical personnel and supplies.