After that, when it came to Liberia, the Americans seemed interested only in the Cold War. If you happened to be a member of the old boss class — if you were one of those Liberians who, since they couldn’t distinguish themselves from the savages by skin color, had turned to calling themselves Americo-Liberians — this wasn’t all bad. Having become the true inheritors of the post-bellum mentality of the grandchildren of the old southern slave holders, the Americos were mostly right-wing, conservative Protestants who believed in the moral and cultural superiority of their gene code, which they had inherited from their African-American ancestors. Consequently, to the delight of U.S. politicians and State Department officials, when the Cold War arrived, the Americos turned out to be as anti-Communist as Barry Goldwater, making the Cold War years, for the Americo ruling class, boom years. Foreign aid fluttered down from the skies like manna onto the wide verandahs and lawns along Broad Street from Mamba Point to Tubman Boulevard, missing altogether the rest of the country, where millions of increasingly disgruntled savages lived in near-starvation in mud-hut jungle villages. This, then, in the spring of 1976, was Liberia, the country to which I had fled.
SATTERTHWAITE AND I stepped from the hushed, air-conditioned interior of the Mercedes into dense, wet heat and a cloudburst of cacophonous sound. It came from a distance. It came from a place out of our sight, but loudly surrounding us, as if blasted from speakers hidden in the branches of the cotton tree spreading overhead — an arrhythmic, sustained slamming of thick flesh against steel, crossed by loud, high-pitched, rising screeches. Not human, not animal, something in between; and not in pain or anger, but something of both.
After a moment, the banging and screeches faded to a held silence. Then abruptly they returned, louder than before. Satterthwaite gestured vaguely in the direction of a large, rusting Quonset hut at the rear of the walled-in compound. “Seems like nobody here today, ’cept them chimps,” he mumbled.
Close by, facing the red-dirt yard, was a squat, four-square building of unpainted cinder-block that looked like a military interrogation center and that Satterthwaite said housed the administration office and lab. He told me to wait by the car and entered the building, returning at once with a ring of keys, which he handed to me. “S’posed to be some kind of caretaker guarding the place alla time,” he said crossly and led me around the main building to a wide, tree-shaded yard behind it, where three small wood-frame cottages with front porches were located side by side. Here the sounds of the chimpanzees were slightly muffled, and for the first time since stepping from the car, I could focus my attention and began to see and hear what was in front of me.
“Them was small-small Firestone houses built for the native foremen. We got ’em moved an’ set ’em up special for the Americans who run the blood lab,” Satterthwaite explained.
Inside, the units were identical — a single room cleanly swept and minimally furnished with a narrow, stripped bed, a table and two chairs, a kitchen counter with a hot plate, a few plastic buckets, enough dishes and utensils for two people, and a closet-sized bathroom. All three buildings were empty and evidently unclaimed. I chose the cottage farthest from the chimps.
“Can’t promise water or ’lectric full time,” Satterthwaite said, smiling. “But mostly it comes. I’ll check on that caretaker fellow,” he added, then dashed back to the air-conditioned comfort of the Mercedes and drove from the compound slowly, almost delicately, as if hoping to be seen by passersby.
I dropped my duffel in a corner. My worldly possessions, entire. Then lay down on the cot, exhausted from travel and the relentless heat and the several shocks of the day, and tried to sleep. But it was impossible. The screeches and banging of metal from the Quonset hut were like an ongoing accident, a slow-motion highway pileup. The racket frightened and confused me. I couldn’t stop hearing it, and couldn’t get used to it either. I wanted only to replay my meeting with Woodrow Sundiata and savor the details, ruminate on their implications. What was wrong with the chimps? Why were they so agitated? Weren’t there people to take care of them, to feed and quiet them down? I’d never seen chimpanzees in the flesh, only on television and in circuses wearing cute costumes — grinning, mischievous little creatures that made us laugh and shake our heads, amazed by their uncanny resemblance to humans and relieved by the difference. But these creatures sounded like huge and powerful beasts. They sounded violent and insane.
I tried covering my head with the thin pillow, but it did no good. Finally, I got up and went into the musty, windowless bathroom, closed the door, and stood in darkness inside the shower stall with the plastic curtain drawn shut on me — and at last could no longer hear them. After a few moments, not so oddly, my thoughts drifted back for the first time in a long time to a rainy night in 1967, standing in line for a movie in Durham, North Carolina, at a small art-house theater. The theater was located across the street from the county jail, a high, dark-brick building with bars in the third-storey windows facing the street and the line of moviegoers below. I’d been sent to North Carolina to help organize SDS chapters at Duke and Chapel Hill, and I remembered the movie — it was Easy Rider, of all things — because it was the only movie I saw that entire fall and I came away loathing it. While I waited in line for the theater to open, a few of the prisoners, men barely visible to the moviegoers on the sidewalk below, started shouting down at us, perhaps at first as a joke or to harass us, hollering obscenities and curses. Hey, you assholes! Motherfuckers! Hey, you cocksuckers, suck on this! And so on. Then other prisoners joined in. I imagined that all of them were black, although surely some were not. In seconds there were dozens of them calling down to us, and their hollers had turned into wild, uncontrolled, enraged screams, and they were banging metal objects against the bars, their tin cups, I supposed, or maybe just their fists — a clamorous, outpouring of anger that so shocked and frightened me that I wanted to break out of line and flee down the rain-soaked street and into the night.
When at last the door to the theater opened and we were able to get inside, the sudden silence of the lobby was even more terrible than the noise outside. It was as if we had become prisoners ourselves. We looked around the lobby at the posters, inhaled the familiar, friendly smell of fresh popcorn and candy, caught one another’s scared gazes, recognized them as our own, and quickly looked elsewhere.
Lost in the memory of that night, I slowly sank to the cool, dry floor of the shower stall — when suddenly something with claws darted across my ankle and calf. I half leapt, half fell from the stall onto the bathroom floor, pushed open the door to the outer room to let in light, and looked carefully back. A brown rat the size of a man’s shoe stared at me from a dark corner of the shower stall. I reached around for something to club it with, something to protect myself from it. Nothing. The bathroom was bare — just a toilet without a seat, an empty plastic pail for a sink. And then I saw the cockroaches. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, though surely they’d been there all along, watching me. Despite the sweltering heat, my body went cold, as shiny, dark-brown packs of brooch-sized cockroaches moved in undulating waves across the walls and over the crackled, lime-green linoleum floor. Scrambling to my feet, I heard again the undiminished screams of the chimps and the clang and bang of large, hard bodies being hurled relentlessly over and over against the steel bars of cages. It was the noise of bedlam, the cries from a madhouse or a torture chamber.