“No, that’s fine,” I said. “But… I’m a little confused. Look, I’m sorry to ask, but I have to. How can I be sure that you’re not…?” I paused. “All right, let me say it. How can I know that you won’t turn me over to the American embassy?”
He smiled. “To tell you the truth, you can’t. But really, Miss Musgrave — may I call you Hannah?”
“Yes! Please do.”
“It’s a lovely name,” he said and flashed his gap-toothed smile. “Yes, Hannah, you wouldn’t do us much good wasting away in an American jail, now would you?” He stood and took my hand in his and examined it, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss it. “You’re not married, are you.” It was more a statement than a question.
“No.”
“And you’ve come here alone. That’s quite something. What about your American companion in Accra?” He glanced back at an open file folder on his desk. “Zachary Procter, he calls himself. Not his real name, of course.”
“No, it’s his real name. He’s still in Accra. In fact, I don’t think Zack even knows where I am. I don’t think he knows I’ve left Ghana. I… I’m quite alone.”
“That’s good. Good for him, I mean. Because I don’t see how we could be as … lenient with Mr. Procter as we are being with you. But let me assure you, Hannah,” he said, and now he did indeed kiss my hand, a gesture that was both comical and elegant, making me smile. “You are no longer alone.”
WOODROW’S OFFICE in the Ministry of Health was located off Tubman Boulevard at the southeastern edge of Monrovia in a freshly built, three-storey, cinder-block cube attached to the John F. Kennedy Medical Center. His assistant, Mr. Satterthwaite, drove the ministry Mercedes, a ten-year-old, velvety, dark gray sedan in immaculate condition, and I sat in air-conditioned ease in the back and gazed at the city as we passed through it. Earlier, coming in from Robertsfield Airport some fifty-five kilometers south of the city — packed into an antique Plymouth sedan with six other passengers picked up along the way until I was finally dropped off at the ministry — I had been so distracted by the heat and so anxious and tentative about my reasons for being in this place, this city, this country, this continent, that I barely noticed where I was, and if the driver or one of my sweating, placid, half-asleep fellow passengers had told me that I’d been returned to Accra by mistake or had been magically transported to New Bedford, Massachusetts, I might have believed him. That’s how disoriented I’d become since leaving Accra. But as I saw clearly now, I certainly was not in New England. And Monrovia was not Accra, and Ghana was not Liberia.
In those days, Monrovia, the capital, was still lovely, if somewhat bizarre looking, at least to my innocent eyes. Innocent, that is, of Liberia’s odd history. The principal buildings of government — the copper-domed capitol; the bright, white palace of the president; the supreme court building; the treasury building; and so on; each pointed out with obvious pride by Satterthwaite as we drove into the city from the ministry offices on the outskirts — were miniaturized versions of the same structures in Washington, D.C., as if down-at-the-heels country cousins were putting on big-city airs. Bisecting the center of the city, its spine, was Broad Street, its two lanes divided by a grassy, parklike island and bordered on both sides by towering trees. Here, along the meandering ridge of Cape Mesurado — the rumpled, densely populated, yet still green peninsula where the Mesurado River meets the sea — white wood-frame houses with wide verandahs and floor-to-ceiling shuttered windows sprawled behind neatly hedged and trimmed front yards garnished with meticulously tended flower beds. Scarlet, yellow, and pink bougainvilleas sloshed against porch steps and over walkways, and lawn sprinklers carved glittery pale arcs in the sunlight. The wide main streets and sidewalks were free of trash and cleanly swept, and at nearly every crossing a steepled Protestant church kept the faith. Unpaved side streets and rutted alleys cut downhill from the ridge into brush-filled gullies, where, as we passed, I glimpsed clusters of one-room shanties, small shops, and narrow, single-storey shotgun houses hand built from cast-off lumber and recycled construction materials. The neighborhoods of the poor. But the poor did not look all that poor. As if the men had gone off early to steady jobs someplace else, almost all of the people I saw down there were babies, small children, and women neatly dressed in cotton skirts and blouses and brilliantly colored traditional wraps and headdresses, adults and children alike carrying something — water in plastic tubs, baskets of groceries and garden produce, firewood, bunches of bananas, a chicken.
West of Broad and strung along United Nations Drive towards the cliffs that overlooked the sea were the luxury hotels, the Ambassador and the Mamba Point, half hidden behind high walls and palms. Along Broad and for several blocks off it, public and commercial buildings preened, many of them fronted by tall, neo-classical columns — the Liberian national bank and branches of U.S. and British banks, the municipal police headquarters, the central post office, the Rivoli Cinema, a few small hotels, public utilities, and most imposing of all, the yellow-brick Masonic temple. Oddly, the streets and buildings of Monrovia and the overall ambience of the city, despite its size and sprawl and mix of architectural styles, didn’t so much suggest late-twentieth-century West Africa as it did a 1940s sleepy Southern county seat; and the city might have been a set for a sentimental movie about postwar Dixie, To Kill a Mockingbird maybe — except that all the actors in the movie, even the extras, were black.
In their dress and demeanor and comportment, and with their slightly diluted coloration, the citizens of Monrovia looked more African-American than African, which in a sense they were, although I knew nothing of that yet. And it was the bourgeois, small-town African-Americans of the 1940s and ’50s that they resembled, not of the 1970s, certainly not of today. In Monrovia, even as recently as twenty-five years ago, when the good citizens left their homes, they dressed up. The middle-class men wore seersucker or linen suits and neckties and sported homburgs or Panama hats, and the women wore respectable calf-length, flower-patterned dresses and white gloves, and even carried parasols. Their children walked hand in hand in simple, neatly pressed school uniforms. Occasionally, one saw a batch of Liberian soldiers bully through the traffic in a U.S. troop carrier or jeep, and one remembered the Cold War and Liberia’s special allegiance to the U.S. One remembered that the country was our man in Africa, as it were. One saw more heavily armed police officers directing traffic than there were vehicles on the streets; and one noticed cadres of uniformed cops with automatic weapons providing security at the banks and other public and corporate buildings; and one recalled the eagerness with which the three-term president, William Tolbert, and his predecessor, the seven-term president Tubman, both men much admired in Washington, had peddled their beautiful country to foreign investors like entertaining and gracious pimps.
But this was before the bloody coups and the civil war — when the population of the city was still made up almost entirely of civilians. The porticoed homes along the ridge were still owned by the descendants of nineteenth-century African-American settlers, and the people living in the gullies and on the side streets were the descendants of the native Africans the former had displaced, tribal villagers who’d run out of arable land and had come to the big city for work. Down by the harbor nestled the shops and warehouses and homes of the Indian and Middle-Eastern traders and merchants who for decades had been migrating there from Uganda and Rwanda. Everyone seemed to be getting by and getting along. And here and there, striding impatiently through the crowd as if looking for the exit, came the few foreigners, who were white and either in Liberia on business or else attached to one of the embassies — the main one being the American Embassy, pointed out to me by Satterthwaite where UN Drive bent north and east towards the Mesurado River and the bay.