Such an arrangement could eventually present us with a unique opportunity to obtain at relatively low cost a significant number of animal subjects without violating ITTA regulations and without alerting our competitors to this abundant new source of animal plasma. As we understand the situation in Monrovia, we are to provide Mr. Sundiata’s ministry with a few nurses and/or laboratory assistants on renewable six-month contracts, with housing costs and salary to be covered by our New York office, and a single shipment of sterile syringes and miscellaneous antibiotics (quantities yet to be determined). In return, the subject animals are thereafter to be placed effectively under our control. Please explore the matter further at your first opportunity. And confirm the above assumptions re: our anticipated costs …
The night I walked out on Zack at Afrikiko’s and abandoned the reality we’d more or less shared since college, I went straight back to the apartment, sat down, and, before I could change my mind, composed a letter to the Liberian assistant minister of public health, asking for a job interview, and the next morning posted it to him. Within a week, I had my answer.
ALL THESE MANY YEARS later, my first meeting with Woodrow still remains vividly clear to me. A ceiling fan turned slowly, stirring the humid air, but not cooling it. My body had been wet with sweat since the moment the plane from Accra landed at Robertsfield Airport. I entered the shabby, disordered office, self-conscious and anxious about my appearance. Compared with the heat and the nearly suffocating humidity here in Monrovia, the weather in Accra had been positively balmy. My hair was frizzled, and my white cotton blouse was wrinkled, and I knew that I had huge, gray sweat circles under my arms. Rivulets trickled between my breasts and down my sides. I felt fat, fleshy.
Seated at his desk, he flattened his hands and splayed his long, slender fingers and slowly, deliberately lifted his face to meet mine. Woodrow Sundiata, Assistant Minister of Public Health of the Republic of Liberia. He was a small, tight-bodied man with a large, nearly bald head, his complexion as dark as a bassoon. He was not a conventionally handsome man, but to me then and there he was sexy. His eyes were light brown, the color of tea with milk. I guessed his age — accurately, it would later turn out — to be forty. He was wearing a pale blue, short-sleeved guayabera shirt, starched and pressed, a heavy gold Rolex on his left wrist, and on his right a bracelet of tiny, white cowrie shells strung on braided leather. No wedding band, I observed.
That first day I saw him as more like an old-time samurai than a modern, post-colonial, West African bureaucrat. It was a first impression that would hold up for several months. There was a visible tension between what I took to be his passionate nature and the means by which he kept it in check — he stood up in a single motion, as if caught by surprise, although Miss Dawn Carrington had been twice announced to him, by phone from his outer office and then by his personal assistant, a young, very tall, very black man named Mr. Satterthwaite, who had showed me in and quickly left us alone.
Woodrow Sundiata stepped back against the latticed window, clasped his hands together high on his chest, and made a little bow. He moved with the confidence of a man used to being in charge of situations and people, I thought, a familiar type to me. He looked directly into my eyes, nowhere else, as if everything he needed to know about me was revealed there. Then, abruptly, he looked away, gestured towards a chair next to his desk, and said, “Please sit down, Miss Musgrave.”
Musgrave! I was suddenly dizzy and sat down quickly, more to keep my bearings than to be polite. I stammered, “I’m sorry, but … but why… why do you say that name?” I was sweating even more heavily than before and had trouble breathing, as much from alarm as the heat and the wet weight of the air, which seemed to have been doubled by his words. Miss Musgrave! It had been more than five years since a stranger called me by my father’s last name. Even underground no one called me by that name, except for Zack, and then only when trying to antagonize me. Was I no longer underground then? Was my secret out? Just like that?
Relief and fear washed over me in successive waves, each nullifying the other. I felt neither emotion on its own, although I knew as a fact, as data, almost, that I was both immensely relieved and very frightened. No, what I felt was simple, mind-numbing shock. Shock at finding myself suddenly no longer underground, for that is what his calling me Miss Musgrave meant. It was now a fact. I said to myself simply, This is amazing!
“Yes, well, the American embassy in Monrovia, as you no doubt know, keeps track of American citizens residing in West Africa,” he said and slipped me a weary, knowing smile and a conspiratorial sigh. “We help them; they help us. Though we, of course, have somewhat different priorities and concerns than do they.” His accent was almost Caribbean, British with a musical, lower-register lilt. “Would you prefer that I call you Miss Carrington then?” he asked.
“No. No, that’s fine. I’m a little … confused, however. And surprised, I guess. That is, that you … that I was allowed to enter the country, I mean.”
“I imagine so. But all appearances to the contrary, Miss Carrington, and in spite of our ancient and mostly honorable, historical connections to the United States, we don’t work for them. And from the file we received, it didn’t seem that your Miss Hannah Musgrave was of any particular danger to the Republic of Liberia,” he said. “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
He laughed. He had a pencil-thick gap in the middle of his upper front teeth which was strikingly attractive to me. “Oh, either one. Are you a danger to us? Are you Hannah Musgrave?”
“No,” I said. “To the first question. And yes to the second.” It was true, I posed no danger to anyone. Not anymore, not after today. Except possibly to myself. And in spite of Dawn Carrington’s name in my passport and on my Ghanaian exit visa and my Liberian entry visa, I was indeed Hannah Musgrave. And loved hearing this man say it. My name. And wanted him to say it again. Miss Musgrave. Hannah Musgrave.
We sat opposite each other in silence for a long moment, while I tried letting the name cover my body and my mind. But it wouldn’t fit over or around me. It pinched and pulled and seemed too small, as if cut for some other woman’s body and mind, a woman who was practically a stranger to me. I was no longer the Hannah Musgrave who’d gone underground in 1970, who’d disappeared from the world of parents, town, college, and university, where she once upon a time had played a central role, or at least a known and recognized role. And I could no more return now to being the old, abandoned Hannah than I could leap forward in time and become the new, nicely recovered Hannah, thank you very much, who tells this story these many years later. I might have been once again dressing myself in Hannah Musgrave’s name, but the woman who was born wearing it was gone, apparently forever, as if she were the unexpected victim of a rare, fast-acting, fatal disease. But if I wasn’t that woman anymore — and was no longer Dawn Carrington — then who was I? Desperately, that afternoon in Assistant Minister Sundiata’s office, I struggled to become the thirty-four-year-old Miss Musgrave freshly arrived in the city of Monrovia from Accra in search of a job, any kind of job, Mr. Sundiata, and housing, any sort of shelter will do, and intelligent company, for I am utterly alone, cut off from all the communities to which I previously belonged. Oh, and yes, thank you, I would be pleased to have dinner with you this evening, sir.
“My assistant, Mr. Satterthwaite, will drive you to your quarters, so you can get settled. Perhaps you’d like to take a short nap and freshen up a bit? I’ll come ’round at seven o’clock, if that’s not too early.”