My Heart Is Like A Cabbage, Part 1 ~ Jerry Mills

Dear Reader,

My Heart Is Like a Cabbage is an autobiographical fiction of the two years I spent in West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, a teacher of English and Science at Peninsula Secondary School in Waterloo, Sierra Leone.

I first tried to write a novel about this experience while a graduate student at Southern Illinois University during the spring of 1969.  Unhappy with the result, I put the manuscript in a box where it remained for nearly 40 years, unread but omnipresent at the edge of consciousness, like a floater in the eye, part of the baggage that I carted to my current home in Arizona, part of the shards of an experience I could never satisfactorily exhume from memory.

When I retired from teaching at Central Arizona College in 2005, with more time on my hands than I ever believed possible, I decided to try my hand at writing fiction and together with a handful of other aspiring writers formed a group which we christened the “Table-toppers” an allusion to Tabletop mountain in Casa Grande, Arizona, and to that surface so familiar to many writers—the tabletop.  For three years I labored at creating a semi-autobiographical fiction about a young professor newly hired at a Midwestern university located in Southeast Missouri on the banks of the Mississippi.  Already that novel has found a home in another box in the closet (and on a handful of CD discs in the care of friends across the country).

But, then, there was that first box gathering dust in the closet.  In the 90s, headlines about the civil war in Sierra Leone rekindled nearly forgotten images and emotions about Africa as the new millennium approached.  At times I wept—I could not believe this was the last link in a chain of events that had begun with my first awareness of Sierra Leone when I was only twenty-one.  What had happened to the place so firmly lodged in my memory, to that seemingly benign and colorful but often tragic culture and a way of life so diametrically different from my own?  And what had happened to the people of that culture with whom I had shared two of the most formative years of my life?  For years I had hidden from others, but mostly from myself, the secrets of those two years.  As I took out the yellowed manuscript and began rereading it, I realized its failures, the naïveté of its telling, its craving to be marketable rather than genuine.

About two years ago I began to reconstruct that experience relying on notes, my fading memories, other sagas of Africa, and the license to invent when the first three failed me.  What you see in its present form is based largely on fact, but obviously the characters and their conversations took on a life of their own as I tried to recreate what I felt was essential to the telling of this story—this, a lesson I learned while writing my first novel.  

I only learned a smattering of Krio, the true lingua franca of Sierra Leone, while there so I beg in advance forgiveness for my poor efforts to patch together bits and pieces of this colorful language in the following pages with the help of the “Peace Corps Krio Language Manual.”  What I regret most is the loss of the musical rendering of this language by its native speakers, the lilting accents, the rising and falling glissandos that could produce a verbal bonbon out of a simple Belgian place name, “Waterloo.”

Lest I forget, it is time for that familiar disclaimer: the names of the characters in this work have been changed to protect the innocent from either my willful or errant misrepresentations of them.  One in particular, my actual roommate the first year, Bruce Gilbert, bore only a passing resemblance to the character Ron in the novel who, because of the demands of unity in storytelling, became an amalgam of  the PC Volunteers, VSO’s, missionaries, and other ex-pats whose acquaintance I made during those two years.  Bruce, the real person, was one of a kind who rightly deserves his own story, and I remember him fondly as mentor, true gentleman and generous friend, and exemplar of the moniker, Captain Sunshine.

I hope readers who find errors of fact in this narrative will share this knowledge with me.  Even though it is impossible to recreate every detail of this history as it actually happened, it has been my intention to be as faithful as possible to the both the facts and spirit of its occurrence.  In this endeavor, let me say “I need all the help I can get.”  

Sincerely,

Gerald Mills

* * * * * *

My Heart Is Like a Cabbage

“There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world.  The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.”

--Gilbert Parker 

Prologue

“Imagine!”  It was a prompt—not, I hope, a gimmick—I often used in writing classes.  Beginning writers often have difficulty tapping into the particulars that have given uniqueness to their experience.  It is so easy to lapse into generalization—even when describing our very own experiences.

And I would say, “Put it on the page . . . yes, that’s it: write it down— ‘Imagine.’  It’s your command to the reader: ‘Imagine.’”  

And suddenly the transformation—for some, at least—their writing flaring into life, the match head of consciousness struck against memory, all manner of sights, sounds and smells: the Braille of tree bark on the finger tips, the limpid caress of a late spring breeze across the hairs of the forearm, the earthy aroma of brewing coffee in early morning—images of experience caught in the flytrap of the senses.

So if I were to say to you, “Imagine Africa,” what could you write if you had never been there?   Could you speak of rain forest and jungle as Barbara Kingsolver: dark, tumid riot of flora and fauna feasting upon its own death and oblivion?  Or the nostalgia for a continent’s raw, festering simplicity, as in “I had a farm in Africa”?  Or would you stare, transfixed by the terror of the experience you never had, and utter with Conrad’s character, Kurtz, in The Heart of Darkness, “The horror”?

Who has not heard, as the final years of the last century wound down, one of the network news anchors intone with ominous deliberation and that ponderous hindsight of their news-making power as the stark, grainy newsreels rolled, “There are few of us over the age of ___  who do not remember exactly where we were on that November day in 1963”?   

The leaves of the calendar whir past.  The years of the 2^nd millennium accumulate, and the number of living witnesses to that day continues to shrink.  Still, time has not dimmed, in those of us who can remember, the impact of those images, and we live with the mythology that has grown up and become etched in American consciousness—the day the music of Camelot died.

I am one of those.  Yet I, unlike most of my fellow Americans at the time, was never subjected to the repeated play on television of this event, over and over, until our nation staggered under the burden of its collective grief.   Ironically, its impact never fully registered in my consciousness until I returned to the United States and witnessed each year as Thanksgiving approached, the ominous drum beat, the hushed, tearful crowds, the small boy saluting the coffin as the caisson bearing it passed, the grieving wife and daughter making themselves touch the flag covering the coffin, the sharp retort of the rifle salute as the body was laid to rest.

For as evening fell on that transformational day in 1963, I was nearly half a world away, in a small, relatively anonymous country on the west coast of Africa, a place that in recent years has gained its own special infamy.  I was attending an event put on by the American Embassy in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone.  I don’t remember who the guest entertainer was, but as a Volunteer in the Peace Corps, I had the opportunity to purchase two tickets.  I was accompanied by my date, an African woman, Ms. Conte, a French teacher from Guinea, an equally anonymous West African nation, she, a colleague at Peninsula Secondary School in the town of Waterloo.  

My date and I drew a good deal of attention that evening as we waited impatiently for the doors to open in the lobby outside the small auditorium.  Fellow volunteers, many of whom had traveled from upcountry for this special occasion, were fascinated by this striking woman in the pastel-green taffeta gown whose infectious laughter and French West African accent drew glances from the surrounding crowd.  I was certain I could detect in their wondering stares a question: how was it that I, Stephen Livingston, had been able to latch onto such a vivacious beauty?

As we continued to wait and the introductions to, and curiosity about, Ms. Conte abated, conversation drifted to speculation: What was holding up the show?  Couldn’t they at least open the doors and let us sit while we waited?  Had something happened to the headliner for the night’s entertainment?  We had been standing in the lobby since a quarter to seven.  The humid heat of the tropic night combined with the press of the crowd was leeching away our enthusiasm.  Ms. Conte fanned herself nervously with a copy of the program.  

Finally, at 7:30, the doors opened.   Relieved, the crowd swept through the opening, jostling for the best seats.  The American ambassador walked onto the stage and a hush gradually fell over the crowd.  His face was ashen, his body language flaccid—his voice faltered and he paused to clear his throat.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I apologize for keeping you waiting so long.  We have just received confirmation of a communiqué from Washington.  It is with great sadness that I must announce President John F. Kennedy was assassinated earlier today.  He was shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, and later pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.”

An audible shockwave rippled through the audience.  A woman began to wail hysterically.  The Volunteers in attendance gapped at one another in astonishment, stricken by the news: our President, the man who had launched the Peace Corps with so much fanfare, this daring initiative in the arena of international affairs, this charismatic, vigorous figure who had thrown down the gauntlet to Americans in such memorable rhetoric: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” this bold leader who had made possible a Missouri boy’s long journey to West Africa was dead—struck down by an assassin’s bullet.

“I’m sorry that I cannot provide further details at this time, but we will pass them along to the local media as they become available.  I know this news comes as a shock to all of us.  Under the circumstances we have decided to cancel this evening’s performance.   We hope you will understand and keep the President’s family in your prayers during this difficult time.”  He paused, trying to keep his composure.  “May God bless America.”

Ms. Conte turned to me.  “Mr. Livingston, I am so very sorry.  Please accept my sympathy.”  Her eyes glistened.

“Thank you,” was all I could say.  The flatness of my own emotions about the news I had just heard made me uncomfortable.

“Who could have done this terrible thing?” she said through tears of anger and shock.

We merged with other Volunteers gathered in a circle in the lobby, despondent, anxious about our futures, hungry for more details.  A party had been planned at the residence of two Freetown Volunteers after the evening’s entertainment.   One of those Volunteers was my closest friend.  A debate ensued: to party, or not to party.  Some thought it unseemly given the news we had just received; however, Phil, the second of the party’s hosts, argued it was a shame to waste all the booze and food.  Anxious not to sound flippant, he suggested we call it a “wake” instead of a party.  Besides, he had a Grundig, the Mercedes of shortwave radios.  So a bargain was struck: we would gather at the party site to hear more news, share our collective sorrow and possibly take comfort in the camaraderie that Heinekens was sure to give.

  In planning the evening, I had assumed Ms. Conte would accompany me to the party, but her face, which had been so brightly animated just a half hour earlier, was now clouded by a grief I still couldn’t fathom.  A man had been murdered, a President.  More symbol than man, what was this symbol to me?  My President, but what of that?  What thing was missing in my psychic makeup that left me unconsumed by sorrow while Ms. Conte grieved as if bereft of a close family member?

She complained of a headache.  Could I simply drop her off at her place on my way to the party?

So I made my way across town to the party alone, alone with the hegemony of my guilt.  Should I, too, call it a night?  My President had died, the man whose call to service of country was not freighted as it had been for past Presidents with the burden of military duty.  His clarion message of duty would forge a new frontier of Foreign Service, a corps of volunteers who would work together with “the citizens of the world . . . for the freedom of man.”  It was heady stuff, even for a cynical 21-year-old who had once wanted to be a missionary before his faith had gradually backslid into agnosticism, a state of mind coached by professors who touted the virtue of questioning everything.

When I arrived at my friend’s pad—for that was the popular lingo for living quarters back then—it was quiet.  The house, belonging to a Methodist mission, was inside a fenced compound, a tranquil island of manicured grass, banana, mango and orange trees amidst a cauldron of human overcrowding and poverty—Freetown proper.   The Methodists saw fit to build this enclave in proximity to the souls they wanted to save, eschewing the higher elevations of the mountains that formed the backdrop of the capital city, the place where most of the white expats and their colleagues of color (diplomats, missionaries, government officials, and foreign managers and consultants) chose to live.  Constructed on the alluvium carried down in torrents of water rushing for centuries from the mountains bordering the south side of Freetown harbor, the five individual living quarters housed the headmaster and his family and other white staff members.

The houses were amply spaced, rising on stilts (a precaution, I suppose, against snakes and the flooding that often occurred in the rainy season and the “teef-man” who knew no season), the grounds tastefully landscaped, protected from its distasteful environs by a high chain-link fence garnished with strands of barbed-wire and guarded by a watchman who stood at attention as I drove in, brightly greeting me with “Good evening, boss,” his machete readily at hand.  I had spent my first night in Freetown in this place, before I was transferred to Waterloo, and still could not escape the jarring irony of its clash with my stateside image of Peace Corps Volunteers working side-by-side with the impoverished “citizens of the world.”

Climbing the staircase to the second level, I could hear the squawk of the Grundig.  Only a handful of people had gathered in the combination living-dining area, most of them clustered around one end of the dining table where my friend Nolan was trying to tune in the BBC.  One of the volunteers, Gail, sat in a corner of the darkened living room, clutching a Kleenex, her mascara streaking down her face.  Nolan’s roommate, Phil, came from the kitchen and strolled over to Gail with two Heinekens in hand, one for her and one for himself.  When she refused the offer, he casually walked to the dining table, set the orphan beer in the center of the table and said “There’s more in the fridge.”  A few took up the offer, lining up at the kitchen door, leaving the first beer unclaimed on the table.  

The news from the BBC was sketchy about the actual assassination, but it was clear that the world, not just the U.S., was in shock as statesmen and dignitaries the world over checked in with carefully scripted expressions of grief and condolence.  

More volunteers made their entry, looking a bit sheepish as they gravitated to the queue forming at the refrigerator.  Dip and chips were put out on the dining table alongside the lone beer that no one would lay claim to.  Finally, Phil set his empty alongside it, grabbed the orphan, took a couple of swigs, walked over to the record player and put on a Beatles album.  He deposited the now half-empty 2^nd bottle of Heinekens on the record stand, grabbed a girl standing close by, relieved her of her bottle as he placed it next to his, and began to dance.

The mood in the house was bipolar, one part reluctance to cut a rug given the solemnity of the news that Kennedy had been assassinated, and one part “What the hell!”—not out of disrespect so much as flowing from a rationale that dismissed the folly of crying over spilled milk.  Kennedy had been shot, just as Lincoln had been shot, just as James Garfield and William McKinley.  Our country had a sordid legacy of violence.  Little did we know, at the time, just how viral that legacy would shortly become.

Phil was a good dancer and others soon paired to take up the challenge of his dancing prowess.  An anonymous hand increased the record player’s volume.  The dancing paused briefly while the living room furniture was moved back against the walls.  The physical exertion and booze gradually liberated the spirits of the Volunteers from the maudlin obsequies levied by death.  Someone giggled; two dancers laughed aloud.

Nolan, though he had been an early advocate of the party/wake, was one of few remaining volunteers who would not abandon their watch at the short-wave radio.  They moved the radio into the kitchen to get away from the noise, but had to jockey with those making beer runs to the fridge.  Nolan, of WASPish heritage, became increasingly distraught at the behavior in the adjoining room: death (especially the death of a revered President) exacted solemnity, not festivity.  I couldn’t shake a similar sentiment, even as I downed my second Heinekens.  Something wasn’t copacetic—Nolan’s word.  As members of the first and second groups of Peace Corps Volunteers in Sierra Leone we were bound to President Kennedy in a historic compact: his assassination diminished us; it diminished our mission.  We sensed his death might raise serious doubts in a country like Sierra Leone (which had just declared its independence from the colonial rule of Great Britain) about the viability of democratic reform.

Suddenly the music and laughter in the adjoining rooms stopped.  I stuck my head around the corner and immediately saw the cause.  Louis, the Assistant Peace Corps Rep. in Sierra Leone, was standing in the middle of a knot of volunteers, a menacing scowl contorting his normally good-natured features.  Clearly distraught, he began lashing out at the Volunteers for their behavior, their disrespect for our President.  Louis, a former professional football player, was the only one in the house who had ever met the President personally.  Not only had he met the President, he had played flag football with the Kennedys on the grounds at Hyannis Port.  His voice cracked as the harangue ended tearfully when he tried to extract a promise: stop the party.  

Phil took up the argument that it wasn’t a party but the time-honored tradition of a wake—a festivity to celebrate the legacy of the President rather than mourning his death.  The rationale was thin, and Louis would have none of it.  A couple of the girls put their arms around him as he staggered to a seat at the dining table.  From there he could hear the staticky chatter of the short-wave radio.  This and the empathetic concern of the girls, as they assured him no one meant any disrespect to the President, appeared to appease his frustration.  Louis was not a naturally angry person; gregarious and affable, he desperately wanted to be liked, even loved, by those he worked with.

He was offered a beer, but refused.  Yet after a time, when one of the girls, who was now giving him her full attention, offered him a sip from hers, he took it and downed the remains in a single gulp.  A few minutes later when someone offered him another, there was no resistance.  His anger had abated; the familiar, warm smile spread across his features.  He asked about the news from the radio.  Someone put the record player back on but kept the volume low.  The party mood began to build again. 

* * * *

The sun’s brightness filtering through my luminous eyelids could no longer be ignored.  I was certain a spear was lodged in my skull.  The wake had finally broken up about two in the morning.  I had fallen asleep on the couch, the lights still blazing, their siren call attracting swarms of insect nightlife which had spawned a gecko feeding frenzy on the walls and ceiling (screens were a rare luxury in West Africa).  I was accustomed to crashing at Nolan and Phil’s pad, but under the protective veil of mosquito netting.  Would a bout of malaria be my just dessert for having participated in the previous night’s bacchanalia?  I moaned as the sharp-edged pain in my skull usurped all other considerations regarding my present and future health.

The room was a mess, beer bottles and other party debris scattered about the room, the furniture still pushed back to the walls in disarray.  The lights still blazed albeit feebly in the morning light.  Their gluttony sated, the geckos had gone back into hiding.  Nolan was in the kitchen, a dour look on his face.

“Where’s Phil?” I asked.

“Major Jock is taking his morning jog,” he replied tartly.

“Jeeze, how does he do it?”

“Organ switch at birth—brains for balls.  I don’t think I can stand being his roomy much longer.  Do you think they would consider transferring me to your school in Waterloo?”

“I dunno.  Captain Sunshine might have something to say about that.”  Captain Sunshine was a reference to my Waterloo roommate.  I had fallen into the habit of adopting Nolan’s pet caricatures for fellow Volunteers.  “We share a very small bedroom.”

Nolan held his index finger against his lips.  In the silence I heard Phil taking the stairs his customary three at a time.  He came panting into the kitchen, still jogging then running in place as he opened the fridge door.

“Hey, where the hell’s the milk?”

I glanced guiltily at the near-empty gallon container in front of me which I had just poured on my cereal.  Phil looked accusingly in my direction.  

“I’ll make some more,” I volunteered.  Powdered milk was the only kind we drank in Sierra Leone.  The huge tins lasted forever.  I had assumed more could be made.

“There is no more.  I told Nolan to pick up some at Chellerams.”

“I forgot, okay?  You’re the only one that drinks that stuff.”  Nolan rolled his eyes.

Phil looked at me again.  “Well, maybe not the only one.”

“Hey,” I said, pushing back my chair.  “I’ll go get some.”

“Forget it,” Phil grinned.  He pulled a bottle of squash from the fridge.  “You guys won’t believe this . . . I stopped at Suzy’s on my jog.”  Suzy was one of the girls consoling Louis the night before.

“The skinny is old Carter’s mad as hell and Louis is in the doghouse.”  Carter was the Peace Corps Rep. in Sierra Leone; an attorney back in the states, he had a pipe permanently cupped in his right hand with which he punctuated his remarks or sucked at meditatively.  “He heard about the party.  It seems about a hundred Fourah Bay College students marched down from Mt. Aureol last night.  They held a candlelight vigil for Kennedy in front of the American Embassy.”

Fourah Bay College was the only four year college in Sierra Leone.  Located in the Colony mountains, it had a panoramic view of Freetown and its harbor.  The hike from there to the embassy was a long one—about six miles—the return hike an arduous one—nearly three thousand feet up.

“I hear Carter is going to call a meeting of all the Volunteers.”

Nolan and I looked at one another.  The shit had hit the fan.  Our latent guilt had blindly hit a wall.  What had we been thinking when we decided to go ahead with the party?  Our President had been murdered for Chrissake!  The Africans had mourned; we had partied.

 “Suzy said no names were mentioned, but they know the party was here.  Personally, I don’t give a shit, but I’m afraid Louis is gonna catch hell.  They may ship his ass back to the States.”

Those were the first words of empathy I had ever heard from Phil’s lips.  Poor Louis.  Phil, whose father was rumored to be a well-placed attorney in the Justice Department, was normally very vocal in his complaints about our PC mission, the resident squeaky wheel among the Volunteers in Sierra Leone.  

As it turned out later, Phil’s premonitions were slightly off base.  Carter had no meeting with the Volunteers.  We all received an innocuous letter, addressed even to the isolated Volunteers who lived upcountry and hadn't yet heard of the party.  The letter reminded us of our mission in Sierra Leone; it spoke of our responsibilities as Peace Corps Volunteers representing the United States.  Not a word about the party.  Louis flew back to the states shortly thereafter.

All of this happened about three months into my second year as a Volunteer in Sierra Leone.  We never heard about the incident again; it was something no one wanted to talk about, the exception being myself.  I tried to talk to Nolan about it, about his take on what had happened that night.  Whether or not Louis was a casualty of this event—that was a secret even Phil’s connections never uncovered.  It may be that it was actually Louis’s decision to leave, prompted by any number of personal motives.  Louis never held his emotions close to his vest.  Carter, on the other hand, was the intellectual: chess and classical music were his forte, drawing his legendary patience and stoical reserve from the omnipresent pipe.  They had been the odd couple briefly overseeing our presence in Sierra Leone.

I have never escaped the feeling that what occurred the night of Kennedy’s assassination in that distant corner of the world was somehow a betrayal, the kind of betrayal that Americans as well as Europeans, in the self-righteous image they often reflect upon themselves, find so easy to ignore.  But perhaps that is only an apocalyptic projection of my own personal betrayals, choices made in the remainder of that second year of my two-year tour of duty which were not in keeping either with the avowed mission of the Corps nor with what I had assumed, but perhaps only hoped, was my own moral compass.  Whatever the source, I could not shake the gnawing sense of guilt: guilt that so many Africans had sincerely grieved over the tragic end of John F. Kennedy’s life while I had partied.

Sadly, some fifty years and one “civil war”* later, Sierra Leone itself is a tragedy that beggars comprehension, the 2^nd lowest ranked country on the Human Development Index and 7^th lowest on the Human Poverty Index.

But I have gotten ahead of myself.  I have begun in medias res, “into the midst of things,” a phrase attributed to Horace, Roman poet and satirist.  I suffer the dilemma of any story teller: where to begin?  Or perhaps how to begin?

*”Civil war” has always seemed a peculiar oxymoron to me.  In the uncounted histories of the world’s nations and particularly in the case of Sierra Leone, the atrocities committed clearly indicate that such wars are anything but civil.  And in Sierra Leone’s case, as so often happens, it was the influence of outsiders that made this a bitter struggle, not for civil change or reconstruction but for power, and to line the pockets of greed’s myriad apostles.

* * * * *

PART I

“To see something is only to establish the first terms of your misunderstanding”

--Ron Carlson, At the Jim Bridger

Chapter 1

They say we are all struck from the stuff of stars, but how . . . and where . . . and when did the universal design, if there is one, begin?  Such questions we leave to scientists and theologians, the experts on first causes.  

However, the chain of cause and event that links the stories of our lives is left to those who have the audacity to reconstruct what they think they have witnessed.  For them the question of beginnings can be a troublesome conundrum, the quicksand of conjecture.  And so they deceive themselves and those who would listen to them, and with a nod to the insistent logic of histories—chronology—they chose a starting point.  But that, too, proves problematic.

Take this particular story—this journey, if you will.  Did it begin in the First Baptist Church of St. Johns, at the ripe age of nine, when, following the conventions of Baptist believers, I made a public confession of my faith in Jesus Christ.  Cloaked in mystery, like all beginnings, this one was sealed by my public dunking behind the altar in the backlit baptismal.  In my heart I kept a secret shared only with my mother, and it made her happy, a contentment that I would never witness again: I wanted to be a missionary when I grew up.

Or perhaps the actual big bang of this story occurred some ten years later in college, at the University of Missouri, when the quest for knowledge led by my professors took me down a path my mother had never traveled, and that, as Robert Frost wrote, “made all the difference” as I gradually drifted into a soulless void of skepticism and agnosticism.

So many beginning points: the notice posted on a kiosk at the University of Missouri—“Volunteers Wanted”; the exam at the Post Office in Columbia, Missouri; the amazing news that I had been accepted into the Peace Corps; the intensive two month “boot camp” in New Paltz, New York, where a disparate group of novices in affairs of state and living abroad—the majority recent graduates like myself—were assembled to “train” to become teachers, to represent the United States of America for two years in a seemingly insignificant country on the West Coast of Africa, to learn in that small window of training something about its history, languages, and customs, and to be reintroduced to the rigors of physical fitness, something many of us had abandoned once we left high school.  These two months, it was quietly noted, would constitute a “selection process.”

I have always thought that Dickens could never be bested in A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—a beginning so successful it has become a cliché; still, it was prophetic or so it seemed to me in the spring of 1962.  It was the best of times because I was finishing my undergraduate degree at Mizzou; it was the worst of times because my degree was in Creative Writing, a pompous-looking piece of paper that promised “all the honors and privileges appertaining thereto” but guaranteed no job prospects and most likely meant I had been moved to the head of the draft status line to serve my country in the military.  

It was the best of times when I entered Peace Corps training, jetting across the country to New Paltz, New York, being treated by the local press as though I were some kind of celebrity—after all the Peace Corps was in its infancy in 1962; Volunteers were a curiosity if nothing else.  It was the worst of times, for it meant I would be leaving home, separated from all the familiar touchstones of my youth and, more particularly, a romance—with a fellow student—which  I longed to consummate.  If I passed muster in training, I would be gone for two years, an impossibly long period of time—this in those nearly forgotten days before personal computers, before the Internet, before Skype, before cell phones shrank the world, keeping it in touch.  And I was bound for West Africa, the “white man’s grave,” a destination no less mysterious or dangerous to my naïve sensibilities than the planet Mars or the dark side of the moon. 

Yet when I think where to begin this particular story, one image always claims my attention:  the total blackness of early a.m. hours during my first trans-Atlantic flight in those days when jet airliners had begun to replace the piston-powered relics.  However, we made the crossing in a DC-6 and for hours on end we felt and heard the ceaseless, reliable drone of the Pratt-Whitney engines.  The plane hurtled through darkness, flung like a heat-seeking missile toward the tropical shores of Africa by executive order of JFK, our Commander-in-Chief.  The noise of the engines may have been a lullaby for some, but I could not sleep as I stared restlessly into what seemed like universal darkness. 

We refueled in Lisbon at 2:00 a.m.  What smelled to me distinctly like urine permeated the air of the terminal, an odor that still lingers in memory.  Then on to Dakar where we catnapped in a hotel close to the airport and changed planes.  Our planes were time machines, carrying us back to the cradle of humankind, the starting gate of homo sapiens’ long marathon to the twentieth century.  Our trip, like the prehistoric journeys of mankind, was also a migration but one that would take us back to those primitive roots lost in the obscuring fog of passing time, not as important to humanity’s story as those earlier migrations but no less important to our individual life journeys.  If I were to give a name to this beginning, I would call it “The Crossing.”

Of course, in the exuberance of our youth, I doubt that any of us viewed the plane ride in this manner.  Our focus, our imagining was claimed by the future.  For nearly nine weeks of training, our anticipation of this day had been whetted by our trainers.  There are no words to convey our excitement, but I doubt that anyone on the plane had been this anxious for day to dawn since those nights before Christmas we suffered through as children.

As was the case of Christmas, we didn’t know what, exactly, lay ahead.  In the dark night of that “Crossing” we could only rely on the clichés fed us by books, newsreels, documentaries—the anecdotes of missionaries, fortune seekers, anthropologists, novelists.

But here we were, nearing a destination where centuries-old barriers of colonialism and those of language, custom, and belief would test our metal.  The difficulty did not faze us; it did not faze me any more than a nearly forgotten memory.  In 1945 my parents succumbed to the sales pitch of a Compton’s Encyclopedia salesman; it was a major investment in those post-Depression days, purchased so that my sister and I might find answers to our questions about the larger world. One day, at age six, I sat thumbing through a volume near the end of the alphabet and came across a picture of an African witch doctor, an image so demoniacal, so fierce and horrible to my imagination that, for years afterward, I could not be coaxed to open the pages of my parents’ investment in my future.

And, of course, there was the barrier of race, though due to our education few of us could admit that this might be a problem.  But as I look once more through the pages of a manual that gave biographical sketches of each group member, I am reminded that only five of the 60 members of our group were African-Americans, three of whom were males who had trouble finding someone who would cut their hair in the small college town of New Paltz.  This was, after all, the early sixties, a time when even one of the most advanced cultures of the world had not yet legislated the humanity and equality of other races, particularly Africans.  And so it would be in Africa.  As I looked at a snapshot the other day taken during our two-year stint in Sierra Leone, I was immediately struck by the story it told: the teachers and headmaster of a Catholic school are ranged before the administration building, the white priests, the white PC volunteers, and other white faculty are sitting on chairs in the front row, the black African staff standing behind them.  In the early 60s, few would have questioned the propriety of this portrait.   

Our ignorance of what really lay ahead was abysmal.  We had been snatched from the upwardly mobile middle-class of arguably the most affluent country in the world.  Had the people who trained us succeeded in drilling into our consciousness anything other than the romance and adventure of this crossing?  Could we comprehend the pulse of our brothers and sisters in humanity who still cooked over wood fires, without gas, without electricity; who rarely had potable water; who mostly walked wherever they wanted to go or thumbed rides to be carted about like produce in the backs of lorries; whose relationship to Mother Nature might be considered hostile from any rational perspective—helpless to withstand the whimsical violence of Her moods, the invisible vectors of disease, the catastrophic natural disasters, the feast or famine pendulum, the history lessons about evolution—that living was indeed the “survival of the fittest” or the luckiest, as all living creatures battled for their link on the interminable food chain?

So there I sat on the edge of my seat, waiting to unwrap the package of the next two years in West Africa, staring down at what was clearly not a “dark continent” but barren reaches of sand, lapped by the Atlantic, the continent’s frothy boundary basking in the first light of dawn.  As we continued south over the stark edge of the great Sahara, vegetation took hold in ragged clumps along the trackless waste.  Bare black bodies shoved dugouts into the surf, and the excitement grew more palpable among yawning Volunteers.  After our nearly 23-hour journey, the plane’s captain announced to cheers that Freetown, Sierra Leone, was dead ahead.  As we made our approach, in deference to this planeload of Peace Corps Volunteers, he circled so we would have a panoramic view of West Africa’s grand natural harbor.

The plane tipped, beginning a long graceful turn, gliding down a gyre’s invisible threads through wispy clouds that momentarily broke apart to give us our first view of sun-drenched Freetown, its bright metal roofs and riot of flora strung like a gaudy silver and emerald necklace about the Colony mountains.  The pilot reminded us during our continuing descent it was the rainy season in Sierra Leone, a final warning that we were about to experience humidity the likes of which we had never experienced.  With an annual average rainfall of nearly 150 inches, nearly all of it falling during the five-month-long rainy season, Freetown vied for being one of the wettest places on the planet. 

The harbor was an estuary at the mouth of the Rokel River.  The land to the east and north was flat and swampy, dense with vegetation.  To the south, a land swell of mountains cresting 3,000 feet above the harbor had been pushed up by some genie of topography.  Freetown proper squatted on a narrow, rising band of detritus.  The mountain foothills, dotted with more stately residences—homes of government ministers, ex-pats, diplomats, and successful entrepreneurs—rose  above the city, and above it all Fourah Bay College clung to a precipitous perch overlooking the city.  

It was lush, verdant—punctuated by columns of wood smoke rising among the trees.  At that very moment this son of the Midwest, who had never been farther east from his St. Louis roots than Peoria, Illinois (at least until he began his Peace Corps training),  nor farther west than Colorado, thought that this surely was one of the most beautiful places on the earth.

Lungi Airport, located on the flat north side of the harbor was a ferry ride away from the city.  As we disembarked from the plane we were momentarily welcomed by a balmy, fragrant breeze.  But the stale, motionless humidity of the airport terminal, a converted hangar, quickly wilted our spirits.  Herded into queues, we waited while customs officials riffled through our bags, intimidating us with scripted, reproachful questions.  It rained sporadically while we inched through the line.  Finally, we were cleared to board a bus for the harbor where a ferry would take us to Freetown proper.  That wonderful scent, wafted through the open windows of the bus, followed us all the way to the ferry.  What could it be?  The fragrance of some rare tropical flower?   

“Smell that?” I asked Nolan, a Volunteer I had befriended in training.

“Orange blossoms,” he said tersely, the authority of someone from Florida.  

How banal—to have come all this distance only to discover the fragrance of orange blossoms!  Yet I marveled that tropical Africa might be so fragrant.

When we left the stuffy confines of the bus our spirits were lifted again by sea breezes as the ferry made its way across the harbor.  The deck throbbed violently, massaging my feet.  I walked to the bow to watch gamboling clouds congeal, darken and begin to obscure the mountain backdrop of Freetown.  Yet the sun still beat down violently on the deck of the ferry, etherizing my awareness, my pulse ticking slow and distant like dripping water in a cave.

“White man’s grave”—the phrase had screamed from the pages of the books I had read to prepare myself for West Africa.  My tour of duty lay not a mile before me.  Africa!  It seemed to float away from my nearsightedness: the vessel-lined quay, behind which white petrol storage tanks squatted like giant mushrooms, the city itself inclining toward the base of the mountains, thinning into clusters of lightly hued residences obscured now and then by roiling clouds.  Jungles, elephants, snakes, baboons, witch doctors, drums in the night—my imagination reeked with montages of my future.  The nearing city seemed terraced into grave plots dotted by stained, molding monuments.  Here lies Stephen Livingston.  Born on the eve of World War II, he came to the dark continent in peace.  Met his reward in the rain forest, bitten by an amorous mamba while taking a crap.  “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement”—William Blake.  Requiescat in pace.

I turned and paced the side facing the delta.  A pregnant black woman, blacker than I had ever imagined even an African could be, lay sprawled like a prodigious fetus on the wood bench that ran half the length of the ferry.  Her face was cradled against a cocked arm, a nearly flat woven platter of peanuts at her head.  She was adrift somewhere, oblivious to the blinding sun, the ferry’s engine noise, the smell of oil and engine fumes, and the strangers all about her, oblivious even to the life she carried within.  Each breath fluttered the flaccid lips in a trilled snore.  The vignette half-fascinated, half-repulsed me: the huge, swollen abdomen, the slick-black skin of her scarred lower legs, the incredibly pink-white soles of her bare feet deeply cracked at the heels.  Was this Africa, its mystery, its fecundity and somnolent persistence as the larger world rushed lemming-like toward an appointment with the second millennium?

I leaned over the gunwale, entranced by the rhythmic “sip-sip” of the water against the ferry—Mother Nature trying to swallow her lost progeny?  A long swelling wave of fatigue washed into my head.  Awake all night, I had peered through the small pupil in the plane’s metal flesh at the forbidding blackness of our crossing.  For nearly two days my consciousness had been held in suspension over terra firma and now it skimmed like a water bug over the surface of the harbor.  My mind dallied at the lip of vertigo.  I concentrated on the sleeping woman swaddled in the comfort of unconsciousness, her mouth trilling like the latex lips of a deflating balloon, her shiny swollen belly spilling from between her short dress with its empire waist and the “lapa” swaddling her thighs: an image that, though five feet distant, registered in my mind the smell of dead fish.

The opposite shore was sliding more rapidly across the harbor to meet us and, at last, the noise and vibration of the engines diminished.  The “sip-sip” of the parting water became gurgling sibilants as the harbor’s wet lips pressed more delicately against the ferry.  A crowd was gathered at the landing ramp, awaiting the return trip to Lungi.  At the very instant the engine’s noise and vibrations ceased, then climbed to a higher pitch as it sought to reverse the ferry’s inertia, the woman on the bench rubbed her eyes and stretched nonchalantly, sensually, like a waking cat.

As the rest of the Volunteers scurried to again board the bus, I squeezed past them and walked to the rear of the deck.  The V of the wake was widening to the shoreline; unintelligible voices came from a small fishing craft rocking on the wake’s lengthening ribs.  A gull dipped, darted before me, then swooped along one of the ebbing swells.  A choice had been made to be told somewhere “with a sigh ages and ages hence.”  Something had been torn away, ripped from the familiar sense of consciousness the self had wrapped itself in.  I, Stephen Livingston, had  been whisked here on the wings of my own personal destiny—I reasoned but could not comprehend—to Africa, a piece of the planet earth known only to me in my imagination.

Chapter 2

As the bus whined up the ramp, then in increments to higher gears, the idyll seen from the plane’s window was erased.  Life boiled under the froth of that postcard beauty I believed I had witnessed—noise, crowding and filth swallowed up the shallow romance.  My nose was second to receive the offensive launched by what my eyes beheld: smell of urine, raw sewage, dead fish, rotting fruit, diesel fumes.  The last wave of the assault breached my hearing: the strident din of horns, engines revving, a Babel of human voices rushing through the open bus windows, now and again the anger of argument and yelled insults as men and women bickered before the myriad stalls and open store fronts.  Buzzards hunkered on the ridges of rusting metal roofs.  Others picked furtively at carcasses in alleyways.  

People milled along the streets—women casually balancing swaying baskets, calabashes and bright wash pans full of produce on their heads, jaywalking, filing in and out between the perpetually stalled vehicles, sauntering through the press of bodies down sidewalks where squatting merchants displayed their wares.  “Look ma, no hands”—we marveled at their nonchalance as the ladies paused to greet acquaintances or bargain for the items arrayed at street side.  Frail looking men struggled with cumbersome, heavily laden carts.  Young boys hawked armfuls of plastic sandals, wooden coat hangers and fruit.  The streets seemed to ripple along their length like the traversing segments of a centipede.  My nerve ends chafed at the crowding and confusion that I had never imagined but which now rubbed my senses raw.  Nothing had prepared me for this.  

Yet it wasn’t long until the city’s complexion began to change: the streets became wider, glass storefronts were protected by corrugated security doors that rolled down like garage doors.  The buildings were more substantial, the crowds thinned, the sidewalks cleared, the traffic became more orderly.  White faces emerged from the doorways.  It was like a breeze lifting the alienation smothering my spirit.

The bus stopped in front of a white two-story building trimmed in blue, Peace Corps headquarters.  It seemed a quiet corner, but the moment the first Volunteer’s feet hit the pavement, he was besieged by a crowd of urchins hawking their wares.

“Masa wan banana?”

“Masa wan granat?”  Ground-nuts we quickly discovered were peanuts.

“Masa wan ohrinch?  A go gi yu foh tuh-pence.”

“Eh, Masa, luk, dis na fain banana.  Na fain bunch,” holding them aloft.  “Yu lehk?  Won bob.”

Scanty, ragged clothing draped from wafer-thin shoulders; spindly, scarred limbs,  distended stomachs, some of them sprouting belly buttons swollen like tumors—they swept down upon us, an avalanche of human want.  The older ones pressed their wares aggressively; the small ones hung back, anxious, wide-eyed with apprehension at the emerging stream of towering white bodies.

Against the advice of another Volunteer, I surrendered to the soft sell of a small, timid girl with a platter of peanuts balanced on her head.  She had been eyeing us with as much wonder and anxiety as I felt gnawing at my own cultural foundations.  She wore what looked like an old slip dangling perilously by one pinned strap from a shoulder blade so fragilely thin, I thought it would surely snap in the shoving press of children jockeying for our attention.  Looking down at her emaciated legs, I saw running sores, and felt a dull repugnance knotting my desire for peanuts.

I held out a dollar bill to her.  “No Sierra Leone money,” I said, with a thin smile.

She fled.

Older boys and young men began to shove through the crowd.  “Hey, boss, yu wan taxi?  A geht fain car foh yu.  Usai yu wan go, boss?  You wan?”  pointing to nearby black Peugeots, their dark hands unfolding in obsequious appeal, the pink palm flesh flashing languidly like the bellies of bottom feeding fish.  The drivers leaned casually against the line of taxis, smoking, attired like pimps, affecting a cool so dramatic you wanted, but were afraid, to laugh as they took our measure through darkly tinted glasses. 

Ignoring their pleas, we filed into the office building that served as Peace Corps Headquarters in Sierra Leone.  Carter Marshall greeted us, pipe in hand, introduced us to his staff and the doctor into whose care we would be entrusted for the next two years.  He informed us that this was just a temporary stop in the day’s journey, that shortly we would be bused up to Fourah Bay College for three days of orientation.  There we would find out our final, separate destinations and meet our roommates for the coming year.  We were reminded of the three goals that had been drilled into our heads in training.  Each of us was expected to dedicate our talents and imagination to:

“Help the people of the host country meet their needs for trained manpower;

Promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of the peoples served;

Promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the American people.”

He concluded with a refrain dear to our hearts, “Anyone want a Coke?”

* * * *

As the bus slowly chugged up the side-winding road to Mt. Aureol, we went from mist, to light rain and finally into a sullen downpour that fogged the windows.  We were certain the driver would no longer be able to navigate the switchbacks, but the bus sputtered on.  I quickly revised the epitaph on the monument at my grave: Made peace with his God flipping end-over-end down the mountain’s sod.  The driver seemed spurred on by my graveside poesy, plunging more recklessly into the thickening deluge.

I remember very little of those three days spent at Fourah Bay College except that the endless speeches by various important dignitaries in the Sierra Leone government were singularly uninspiring. A few seemed vaguely threatening, inflated by self-serving rhetoric, as they broached the topic of our role and mission in Sierra Leone.  All of us were to be placed as teachers in the country’s secondary schools as had been the case with the first round of Volunteers who had been installed in their positions the year before our arrival.  The Minister of Education made a point to warn us about getting involved in the country’s politics.  Teach and mind the scholars (as they called the students)—that was our role, our mission.

My most vivid memory was of my many trips to the “loo” as the English and the denizens of their former colonies called it.  My bowels became looser and looser until it became painful to sit and my anus twitched even in repose, a blank eye with a vicious tic.  The dormitory food became an immediate suspect.  I began to wonder how I could possibly endure two more years of this.

The second evening we were given our assignments and an opportunity to meet our roommates.  I was assigned to Peninsula Secondary School, a new 7th Day Adventist mission in Waterloo, a small village about twenty miles inland from Freetown.  The moment I heard the word “Waterloo” I thought of Stonewall Jackson’s haunting 1959 hit, “Everybody has to meet his Waterloo.”  Somewhere out there, my Waterloo was waiting.

Another omen occurred that evening at Fourah Bay.  My roommate from the first group of Volunteers distinguished himself as one of only two no-shows.  Rumor had it he was off somewhere “upcountry,” doing what, no one knew for certain.  Hiking, most likely, as Ron’s reputation as outdoorsman and mountain climber preceded his appearance in the flesh.  The oldest member of his group, I learned he had already climbed Mt. McKinley, the Matterhorn and Kilimanjaro and was saving up for the big one in the Himalayas.  

My roomy finally showed up on the last day of our orientation.  High spirited, boyish in appearance at thirty-five, he was obviously well travelled.  On the surface, he seemed supremely optimistic, smiling and buoyant in his interactions with others, hence the moniker that Nolan would soon give him, “Captain Sunshine.”  So I was a bit taken aback when he immediately shared his judgment about Waterloo: burn or bulldoze it to the ground—start over—this in the days before political correctness became a fetish.  By his report, the village was a sleepy, hopeless backwater where the “bush” and the environs of the Colony collided to the detriment of both.  The best thing about Waterloo was its closeness to Freetown’s pristine beaches.  And Ron had managed to wangle one of the dozen or so Jeep station wagons from Uncle Carter to facilitate his weekend escapes from Waterloo.  Without the Jeep, a prize guardedly reserved for Volunteers stationed upcountry in remote or isolated locations, Ron readily confessed, he would have long ago fled back to the states to pursue his dream of growing apples in Yakima.

He drove off after dinner that evening in the Jeep to spend the night with Phil, my friend Nolan’s assigned roommate from the first group.  Ron assured me everything had worked out famously.  Phil and Nolan would be our hosts every weekend when we came to Freetown to party and hit the beaches.  

It was our last night at Fourah Bay, where we had been closeted for three days.  Four of us decided we wanted to sample the nightlife of Freetown which we had only seen from afar at our perch on Mt. Aureol.  We wanted to meet real Africans, not the shirts who had lectured us daily in this monastic setting.  We wanted a beer for Chrissake!  But with no wheels, we had to make the trek down the narrow, twisting road on foot.  Dusk fell as we left and it quickly became pitch dark.  Slowly we began to realize how foolish our assessment of the distance had been.

I don’t remember much from that long hike.  The prospect of hitching a ride, due to our numbers, was grim and most cars on the road struggled up the mountain in the opposite direction.  Mysterious drum rhythms issued from the dark ravines cut into the mountainside.  A party?  Some pagan ceremony played out in the darkness, just a few hundred feet below Fourah Bay College, the oldest Western-style university in West Africa?  Dogs barked.  Occasionally, voices floated up from the darkness, borne to our ears like invisible cartoon balloons.  Our hike was one of those brief bonding experiences that have no lasting impact on the course of the lives it brings together.

When we finally reached the city, it had all of the appeal of those proverbial small towns where the sidewalks are rolled up before nine o’clock.  Friday night, and only dogs and shadows were abroad.  We shuffled aimlessly down the tangled maze of dimly lit streets past the shuttered windows and doors of homes and small shops.  Where was the night life, the action?  Where was the real Freetown, the real Africa?  Had we passed it in the dark ravines as we hiked down the mountain?  

Where the hell was everybody?  We looked up at the distant lights of the college to get our bearings.  What a bust, this wilting passion to discover the dark continent!  We were reduced to the denominator of thirst.  In the clammy, still air we stopped before an advertisement, a sweating bottle of Heineken’s alongside a tall glass of amber liquid effervescing into our imaginations, the cold rush rinsing away the menace of our growing frustration.   

The ad hung above an open door through which light issued.  A small peeling sign alongside the opening said, “Spirits.”  We straggled in watched by three sets of appraising eyes, the bartender’s and two customers.  More brightly lit than we expected, it was missing the dim ambience and customary mirrored backdrop of ranked bottles of alcohol.  The “bar” looked more like a counter and the only thing on the wall behind it was another ad, this one for Star Beer, Sierra Leone’s very own national brew, a middle-class African couple sporting bright smiles as they toasted the good life.  The fellow at the bar had a surly look and made no motion to come to the table where we sat.  Meanwhile the two customers conversed in a language we argued was either Mende or Temne or maybe one of those many other tribal languages we hadn’t been exposed to.  How would we know?

By mutual agreement we decided to order Star Beer, curious about its taste and wanting to ingratiate ourselves with the locals.  Fred, the best Krio speaker in our group, volunteered to visit the bar to order.  We thought we sensed reluctance on the part of the bartender to serve us, for he had a pained look on his face as he listened to Fred’s Krio.  Finally, Fred pointed to the sign on the wall behind the bar and held up four fingers.  

“Lie-la, dis— ,” the bartender bit off the end of his sentence.  In exasperation he pulled the bottles out from under the counter banging them down on the wood surface.   

Fred turned to us holding a bottle up for our inspection.  “They’re warm,” a question disguised as a statement.

We looked at one another then gestured for him to bring them anyway.  Since none of us had any Sierra Leone currency, Fred laid an American twenty on the counter.  The bartender regarded it with mild disgust, but finally picked it up and put it in a metal box, then wiped the counter with deliberation, ignoring Fred.

Fred stared at him incredulously.  “Change?”

This was 1962, mind you.  Five dollars for a bottle of warm beer!  Pretty pricey in anybody’s currency, even with the price for exchange factored in.

“No change,” came the curt response.

Fred shrugged his shoulders and grabbed the bottles again.  He set them in the middle of our table.

“They’re not open,” I said.  “How are we supposed open them?”

He glared at me and barked under his breath, “With your fuckin’ teeth!”

I picked up one of the bottles and examined the cap, this in the days before twist-offs.  No way, I thought.  My chair scrapped loudly as I backed away from the table and took my warm beer back to the counter.  In my best sign language I indicated my need for a bottle opener.  The bartender smirked then slid a church key across the counter.  

We thought we heard snickers coming from the other two customers hunkered at a table in the corner.

We sat there sipping our tepid beers meditatively.  So much for getting close to the natives.  We tried to tease some humor from the situation’s irony.  After a few sips, it wasn’t so difficult.  Half-way through mine I had the sudden urge to pee.  I glanced around the room for a sign that might indicate the direction of the restrooms.  No such luck.  I looked over at the bartender.  Jeez, did I dare bother our surly host again?

But nature’s call would not be denied as I crossed and uncrossed my legs.  Again, the chair legs shrieked on the concrete floor as I mustered up the courage to ask—beg, if need be.

“Do you have a restroom?” I managed weakly.

He stared at me like I used to stare at the woman next door in St. Louis who claimed her dog could sing “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night.”

I remembered the English word for toilet?  Loo?  “Oosai da loo?” I said in my finest Krio.

He seemed unable to resist another smirk, thumbing a blank door in the wall at the end of the bar.  I walked to the door, opened it and found myself staring at an empty alley.  I peered back around the door with what I thought was a question written on my face.  Nobody was looking in my direction.  Perhaps my Krio had failed me.  Or maybe there was an outhouse in the back of the building?

Ah, what the hell!  Gingerly, I stepped down into the alley, my bladder shoring up my courage.  It was dark, so I carefully picked my way over the alley’s slick footing, the air fouled by the smell of raw sewage.  Reaching the back of the building, I surveyed the empty lot there.  Nope.  No outhouse!  Perhaps I was mistaken about the bartender’s gesture; maybe he had pointed to another door that had escaped my notice.  

Groping my way back to the door, I reentered the bar.  Nolan greeted me as I rejoined the group.  “Feel better now?”

“Nope,” I grimaced at the urging in my crotch.  I surveyed the room again and saw only the entrance door and the one that led to the alley.

“Didn’t you take a leak?”

“There’s nothing there but an alley,” I explained.

“What did you expect, a bidet?”  It was Fred’s turn to smirk.  “When Africans want to take a leak, they don’t stand—or sit—on ceremony.  They whip out their dicks and let fly.”

Man, why are you always Mr. Crude, I thought.  I had never gotten along with Fred even in training.  Despite his gift for learning Krio and African lore, I had been convinced the shrink assigned to screen us during training had made a major error in not sending him home.  Diplomacy was definitely not Fred’s forte.  However, my pain was prompting panic, so I returned to the door, down the alley three steps and relieved myself, with a certain savoir faire and a mounting crescendo of justice served, against the wall of the bar.  A snippet of dismembered song lyric played in my mind—“every puppy has his day.”

Chapter 3

Ron was a man of his word.  He had promised to pick me up early in the morning.  That meant 6:30 a.m.  I said my goodbyes to the few fellow Volunteers who were shuffling in and out of the communal bathroom.   Groggy and still under the influence of the previous night’s adventure, I dragged the duffle bag with all of my worldly possessions to the Jeep.  The sky was overcast and a light fog chilled the air as we walked back to the cafeteria for breakfast.  They weren’t ready to serve the main course so we grabbed stale Danish and coffee. 

The ride back to Fourah Bay the previous night had been an adventure.  The four of us were stuffed into an aged Peugeot along with the driver and his sidekick.  The floor was covered with linoleum, and a strong odor like shoe polish masked all other smells in the interior.    

Nolan nudged me.  “Check out the chicks,” he whispered.  The dash and sun visors sported decals of white females in pinup poses.  A pair of shaggy, oversized dice tangoed from the rear view mirror, and the original headliner had been replaced with fake leopard skin.

African cabbies are compelled, for the sake of appearances, to press their bodies as close to the driver’s side door as is humanly possible.  The right arm is cocked, hugging the outside of the door up to the armpit while the left arm manages most of the steering and shifting.  For this reason, the steering wheel is equipped with one of those knobs so popular before the advent of power steering. Shifting gears is a deft art form, for the driver, huddled tightly to the door, has to reach through the steering wheel to shift.  All of this is done while the right arm tenaciously maintains its role of anchoring the driver’s body to the door.  

Unlike cab drivers elsewhere, they never travel alone but always with a sidekick whose singular role (when not hawking fares) is filling the air with colorful insults directed at pedestrians and other drivers.

Playing chicken at Freetown’s one-way bridges appeared to be a point of honor among young warrior cabbies, as was playing ditties on the horn.  Though there was little traffic that night, our maestro was allegro non troppo as we lurched and rolled from side to side up the switchbacks on our return to Fourah Bay College.  Once more my life seemed to dangle perilously over the pit of oblivion.

But that morning Ron, thankfully, was much more prudent in his descent from Mt. Aureol, driving like the old man his thirty-five years had cast in my perception.  We crossed a bridge where the water cascaded in torrents from the rain-soaked heights of the Colony mountains down to the invisible harbor.  Thin, gauzy mists floated across the road, writhing and distending like monstrous gray amoebae.

“I hate this goddamn road,” Ron said, peering intently through the windshield.

“Should have been with us last night.”

“Yeah?”

“Four of us took a cab from Freetown back to the college.”

Ron dispensed his first advice: “Rule number one in Africa: never take a cab, especially if you value your life, and especially on a road like this.  Rule number two, don’t ever even consider riding in a lorry.” 

“What’s a lorry?”

“A medium sized cargo truck—used in Africa mostly for hauling human cargo.”

“So how do Volunteers get around?”

“As far as I’m concerned you beg, borrow, or steal a set of wheels.  Some of our fellow PC’s stuck upcountry would kill for this Jeep.”  He patted the dash affectionately.  “Old Silver here is not always the most trustworthy transportation but I know a Syrian mechanic in Freetown who manages to keep it on the road.  Not only are there never enough to go around but they won’t let us buy our own wheels.  Then the damn cheapskates in Washington provide these ‘made in America’ pieces of crap without four-wheel drive.”  

He stroked the dash this time.  “Sorry old boy. . . . They should at least buy four-wheel drives, preferably Land Rovers.   Even a fleet of VW Vans would have been better to navigate these fuckin’ roads, especially in the rainy season.”  

He pulled the Jeep into a parking space in front of a store with a large red- lettered sign painted above its canopy, “Kingsway.”  

“C’mon,” he said, beckoning.  “I’ve gotta pick up some stuff.  I’m not used to cooking for two.  You can exchange your American dollars for Sierra Leone currency in here.” 

Half a dozen beggars had taken up stations in front of the store.  Ron brusquely ignored them, but they quickly caught my scent—a fresh mark.  

“Mornin’ boss.  Any good for de poor?  Please, sah—I beg, sah.  Will you gimme dash?”

The fingers were missing from the hands one of them thrust out to me, his legless body mounted on a crude, wooden dolly which he propelled with his stump-like hands.  

       Leprosy?  During our training the doctors had spoken of its presence in Sierra Leone, but I was unprepared for this encounter, the perfect recipe for another anxiety attack: a dash of repugnance, a pinch of compassion—blended with a healthy measure of dread.  He stirred an emotion not unlike the woman on the ferry and the frail little girl at Peace Corps headquarters: guilt squandered on something I could not possibly be responsible for but, nonetheless, could not ignore.  Why had dame fortune smiled on my existence and not theirs?  

The litany continued nonstop, breathlessly, “Please, sah; I beg sah,” as he trundled along the sidewalk trying to keep pace, his plea as scathing as it was insistent.  I reached in my pocket for the American change I knew was there.  Ron turned, frowning.

“He’ll never leave you alone every time you come here if you dash him now.”

“Boss, I beg sah!  For de poor.  Do you gimme dash?” he entreated as he looked from Ron back to me.

His pleas set off alarms.  I drew my shoulders upward, as if raising the drawbridge to some inner sanctum where the self resides.  The sense of who and what I was had come under siege, not from an enemy but invading minions who sought refuge from the slings and arrows of their misfortune.   I watched other white customers shoo the beggars away or scurry into the safety of the store with feigned indifference.  I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, making a pretense of blowing my nose, then ducked inside after Ron.

“Rumor has it he owns a 30% interest in the store.” Ron’s smile was warped by sarcasm as he thumbed the beggar who was already spewing his pitch to a new victim.  

Having seen nothing but vegetables and fruits spread out on the sidewalks of Freetown, in filthy fly-infested stalls or balanced on a woman’s or child’s head, it was as if my spirit was once again baptized in the anesthetizing waters of the world’s middle-class.  The cornucopia rose in tiers all about me.  All manner of canned goods beckoned to my wondering eyes: vegetables, gourmet meats, butter, even Spam.  There were breakfast cereals just like home, sundries, liquors, and the piece de resistance, a frozen food section with lamb, beef, chicken, and pork cuts, even ground beef from Denmark.  Other sections of the store were devoted to apparel, sporting goods, jewelry, electronics.  I marveled: so many white faces, some with freckles, blue eyes, green eyes, blonde, red and brunette hair—sleek, insouciant beings whose pampered bodies were whole.  They dallied from aisle to aisle, plucking at the racks of clothing, frowning as they weighed the inexhaustible choices before them, engaging one another in small talk about style, value, color, taste.  What was wrong with this picture?  

Ron directed me to the small cubicle near the rear of the store where I could exchange my dollars for Leones which were identified by British denominations: pounds, shillings, and pence.  In the meantime he rolled through the aisles, a man on a mission, yanking our larder from the ranked shelves, impatiently awaiting me at the checkout by the time I had finished my exchange.  I was surprised when he didn’t pay the cashier, but simply signed his name in a ledger.

“They bill us at the beginning of each month,” he explained, seeing the question on my face.  

“How did you establish credit?”

“I’m white, aren’t I?”

On the way out, when Ron wasn’t looking, I slipped the beggar a coin though largely ignorant of its value.

* * * *

Sierra Leone’s claim to independence and sovereignty in 1961, as witnessed by their currency, piggybacked on the cultural norms of Mother England.  It had been a bloodless coup, a symbolic power transfer that heralded no visible changes in the status quo: the British toilet paper, which the average citizen had no use for, still had the consistency of waxed paper, and the mayor of Freetown was still addressed as “His Worship,” an African who traced the lineage of his office back to the Royal Charter granted by “His Late Majesty King George III in the year 1799.”  He wore the robes of a 16th century official, a large silver chain of office draped from his shoulders across his chest just like those worn by English officials. 

Unlike the politicians in Ghana of the early sixties, who had learned to play the Russians against the Americans in the game of garnering foreign aid, Sierra Leone’s national vision looked back in time, not forward.

As a former colony of Mother England, Sierra Leone had adopted the curious English habit of driving on the “wrong” side of the road.  The Peace Corps Jeep fleet had been retrofitted with jerry-built linkage to accommodate this cultural quirk, which, I would soon learn caused many of the problems associated with our Silver.  Driving on the left side of the road would be, I was certain, an impediment to my own independence in Sierra Leone.  How did one manage to pass another car on the right?  However, as we drove down Bai Bureh Road towards Waterloo, I marveled at Ron’s nonchalance as he threaded his way through the throngs of people and traffic snarls on the edge of Freetown, Marba Town, and Kissy.  

“You’ll get used to it,” my roommate assured me.

The road afforded more challenges than simply driving on the left as it twisted and wound along the edges of the Colony mountains foothills.  One-way bridges created a special challenge: a game of chicken with on-coming traffic.  Ron pointed to the rusting wrecks at the bottom of the cavernous ravines—losers, I surmised.

And as for chicken, each little cluster of huts along the road provided a slalom run through scurrying roosters and hens which had made the pavement their foraging grounds.  Hitch-hikers dotted the roadside at intervals, gesturing in elaborate bows or waving maniacally to get a driver’s attention.  Several pushed the envelope of their pleas beyond the narrow shoulder of the road into on-coming traffic then dashed for cover as veering vehicles sped past.

As we came over a small hill, we found ourselves bearing down on a lorry parked squarely in our lane.  Ron hit the brakes, swerving into the right lane.

“Fuckin’ idiots!” he cried, shaking his head savagely and laying on the horn as we passed.

  I saw a large knot of people under a tree at the edge of the road.  There were a couple of goats.  Large stones had been placed under the lorry’s wheels; two men were lying on the pavement underneath the truck working on the undercarriage.  As we passed I turned and looked at the front of the truck.  Above the windshield, emblazoned in bright yellow letters, were the words, “Make Way for the Gas Man.”  The headliner of the truck sported a decorative valance from which dangled garishly-colored disks and fuzz balls, trim more fitting on the hem of a belly dancer’s skirt.

“That’s what we would be riding in if we didn’t have old Silver.”  Ron patted the dash affectionately again, glaring at the road.  

“Fuckin’ Africans have absolutely no common sense.  Can you believe?  Working on the goddamned truck in the middle of the highway at the brow of a hill?  That’s how people think in Africa.  It’s crazy, man!  I wouldn’t ride in one of those if you paid me: the drivers are drunk more often than not; they pack people and all their belongings, goats, chickens, cargo—you name it—in  the back of those things and then browbeat you into overpaying for the privilege of riding in them.

“I tried getting back and forth to Freetown for two weeks in those damn things.  It was Russian roulette.  I told Carter, ‘You get me some wheels or I’m goin’ home.’”

I kept my own counsel as I listened to these narrative tidbits from a one-year veteran of the Peace Corps, Captain Sunshine no less.  I remembered a caveat I had read somewhere: “Africa does strange things to people.”  Did that include the natives, I wondered?

As we came out on the other side of Hastings, the only major settlement between Freetown and Waterloo, a lone, elderly hitch-hiker in flowing robes, leaning on a crudely fashioned crutch, bowed politely as we approached.  The skies had clouded up since we left Freetown and it had begun to rain lightly.  

“Why don’t we give him a lift?” I asked.

I was a little surprised when Ron brought the Jeep to a sliding stop, backed up and motioned for the guy to get aboard.  Perhaps Ron’s memory of lorry rides had solicited this sudden indulgence of the golden rule.  I climbed out since the Jeep, despite being a wagon model, had only two doors.  The front passenger seat had to be folded over to allow other passengers to climb in the back seat.

“Mornin’, your worship,” the old man said to me, as he hobbled up.

I was taken aback by the greeting.  No one in my experience had ever merited such a slavish title.  

“Good morning,” I returned. 

“Oosai you dey go?” Ron asked.

“Ar go na yonder,” the old man pointed down the highway in the direction we were headed.

“We can take you as far as Waterloo, Pa.”  Ron eyed the man suspiciously. “Climb aboard.”

The old guy made a deep bow then turned and walked toward the dense undergrowth alongside the road.

I looked at Ron.  “Did he misunderstand?”

Ron turned to look out the rear window in the direction the man had headed.  “Shit!” he spat, swinging around to the steering wheel.  “Get in—get your ass in here quick!” he barked.  He was gunning the motor, trying to get the obstinate transmission back in first.

I looked back astonished.  Three kids were running pell-mell toward the Jeep, followed by two older women, one with a huge burlap bag on her head, and the other bearing a small child on her back.  The old man was moving at a steady gait this time on his crutch.  We had been snookered.

“Get in, damnit!”  Ron yelled at me.

But the kids were already at the door scrambling to be first in the front seat.  It was beginning to rain harder, large drops that stung like hail.  I tried to shoo the kids out of the seat so I could flip it over.  Ron was beating his forearms on the steering wheel.  The old man yelled something unintelligible at the children who proceeded to wiggle over the front seat into the back.

It was raining hard now and I was getting soaked.  One of the women had climbed into the front seat and was trying to maneuver over it as the smaller kids had, but the baby on her back made it impossible.  Ron tried to push her out of the Jeep.  Then the old man barked at her and she backed out into the pouring rain.

“Ah, fuck it,” Ron said in exasperation, rolling the hinged passenger seat forward so that they could all pile in the back.  The other woman heaved the burlap bag over the back seat at the old man’s direction.  It was leaking grains of rice.  I rolled the front seat back into position as Ron let out the clutch; I had to make a running jump to get aboard as the Jeep eased back onto the tarmac.

The rain began coming down in earnest.  Our windshield became a blinding sheet of water, and the wiper blades were losing the struggle against the downpour.  We were crawling along now, Ron hunched over the steering wheel, trying to follow the narrow ribbon of paved road.  I looked back at our passengers.  They were wet and wide-eyed with wonder, all arms and legs, like lobsters crammed in a pot.  A lightning bolt hit the ground next to the road ahead and the ear-splitting thunderclap broadcast its closeness.  The kids screamed in fear which quickly turned to delight. 

The old man suddenly became agitated, tapping Ron on the shoulder and pointing out the passenger side window.  Ron tried to ignore him, but this only excited the old man further, as he continued babbling loudly in a language neither of us recognized.  

“What the hell does he want now?”  Ron asked the windshield.

One of the older kids yelled, “Hey, driver, one bell—one bell-o!”  Then I saw the road sign out the passenger window.

“Must be an intersection coming up.  Maybe he wants to get out here.”

The rain had begun to let up and Ron slowed at the intersection, a broad treeless swath cut in the dense growth alongside the road.  An uneven laterite road trailed off to the right, disappearing around a bend.  We turned off onto the road then slid to a stop.  

Swinging his arm back over the front seat as he turned to face them, Ron looked the old man in the eye and pointed at my door.  “End of the road, Pa.  Out!”

The old man sat motionless, boldly holding his ground.  There was a pained look on his face as if some major faux pas in hitch-hiking etiquette had been breached.  The air outside the Jeep had grown chilly, and the windows were steaming up from body heat.  The odor of our human cargo was becoming overpowering.  The old man remained as motionless as a statue, his arms folded in the international body language of resolve: evidently, in his mind, a bargain had been struck and he wasn’t going to let Ron renege.

“Get out!” Ron screamed.  “Taxi done finish, you sabi?”

One of the children began to cry.  The rain interrupted the standoff, hammering with the intensity of hail on the metal roof of the Jeep.  I looked at Ron, pleading with my eyes.

“Ron, you can’t turn them out in this.” 

He glared back.  “So what the hell are we supposed to do?  I’ve never been on this goddamned road, but I hate like hell to leave the tarmac in this downpour.  It probably goes over the Colony hills to the Atlantic.  After a rain like this it could be near impassable.  Besides, we have frozen stuff in the back.  We’ve got to get it home.”

“Can’t we just take them down the road a little bit—at least till the rain lets up?”

Ron looked at me in disbelief, and then threw up his hands in a gesture of martyrdom.  The Jeep nosed forward back onto the red laterite.  As I had hoped, the rain began to subside but the shoulder of the road narrowed to non-existence.  The roadside rose in a high embankment on the left and dropped precipitously into a deep ravine on the right.  No place to turn around once we discharged our human cargo.

“Now what do we do?”  Ron peered down the road.  It had dwindled to a steep track with two rivulets flowing down the ruts cut by previous traffic.  “Shit.  I knew I should have never picked that old bastard up.”

I turned to look at our passengers.  They didn’t return my gaze but looked out the windows at the surrounding landscape in breathless silence.  Only the old man stared relentlessly ahead.

“Aw, fuck it,” Ron said, reviving the engine as he released the clutch.  The Jeep jumped back into motion, bouncing and lurching like a drunk staggering up the road.  It was my first premonition that Silver was no match for the treachery of a rain-soaked West African road.

We kept climbing, the rain continued steadily, though more lightly.  But our odyssey was becoming doubly hazardous as the wheels spun and the Jeep fishtailed in the slick red clay.  Then we slid and crunched to another sudden stop that pitched our passengers into the back of the front seat.  Ron’s forearms were resting on the steering wheel, his head bowed in exasperation.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t believe this,” Ron said, wagging his head from side to side like some modern-day Job pondering the capricious ways of his creator.  “Flat.”

“What?  A flat tire?  I don’t feel anything.  How do you know?”

“Trust me,” he said, letting out a pent up sigh.  

As he opened his door, I opened mine and hopped down on the slick laterite.  Sure enough, the rear end of the Jeep was pitched toward the passenger side, the rim of the rear wheel resting on what looked like an enormous flip-flop.  The entire length of the Jeep was splattered with red clay.

Ron turned the handle on the rear cargo door which was covered with red clay, lifted the window and peered inside.

“Jesus!” he cried, popping the latch on the tailgate.   As it flopped down, the bag of rice, which our passengers had thrown on top of our food, rolled out spilling some of its contents.  Our bread, bananas and eggs had been squashed by the weight of the rice.  My duffle bag also looked the worse for wear.

Ron stomped to the passenger door, rolled the seat forward, yanked one of the kids from the Jeep and flung him to the side of the road.

“Get your black butts out of there!” he screamed at the remaining wide-eyed passengers.

Slowly, cautiously, they disembarked one-by-one, the small ones squeezing past Ron, ducking their heads and averting their faces as if expecting a blow.  The ladies followed glancing askance first at Ron then me.  When they saw the spilled rice they began wailing.  The old man still sat in the Jeep with his hands folded over the top of his crutch, staring fixedly in the direction he felt we were obliged to carry him.  

Ron ignored both the old man and the ladies as he dug the bumper jack out of the back.  Using a bumper jack to change a tire is risky business, even under the best of conditions, but it’s an invitation to disaster on a slippery incline.  So I pumped the jack cautiously, a click at a time, while Ron slid stones under the axle in the event the jack collapsed.  It continued to drizzle but a few prayers and several imprecations later, we had the spare tire mounted.  Ron’s T-shirt and jeans looked like the side of the Jeep, a tie-dye of red clay.  Ditto my shoes and pants.

Our disgruntled passengers had hung around as if awaiting some miracle of capitulation, so I had to shoo them out of the way when Ron started the Jeep then backed over the top of their precious rice and sped down the road in reverse.  For a moment I thought I was going to be left to my own fate with our hitchhikers, but the Jeep slid to a halt and he summoned me impatiently with the horn.  The return journey down that road was the fastest mile and a half I have ever travelled backwards in a vehicle of any kind.  By the time we reached a spot where we could turn the Jeep around, naturally, it had quit raining.  

We drove the rest of the way to Waterloo in strained silence.  Many questions were buzzing in my mind, questions I had wanted to ask before our episode with the hitchhikers, but now each of us was enveloped in his own soundless bubble.  What was Peninsula Secondary School like?  How big—how many students?  Was the headmaster easy to get along with?  Did Ron know what I would be teaching?  What about the town of Waterloo: any stores, entertainment?  Did we have electricity at the house?  Surely there was else why did we buy all the frozen food.  Did the school have electricity?

Now I had even more questions.  The ones I had wanted to ask earlier could wait, but most of my new questions would probably never get asked.  I realized that Ron had borne most of the weight of the predicament I had gotten us into.  No doubt stress played a role in his behavior, but I was shocked by what I had witnessed: it wasn’t what I had expected from a Peace Corps Volunteer, especially that business about promoting a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the American people.

I had read Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, their fictional accounts of the peculiar impact Africa often had on whites.  Could a year in Sierra Leone cause the behavior I had witnessed in Ron, or had he come to West Africa for the wrong reasons, bearing the baggage of racism and American superiority?  Certainly, if that was the case, then the Corps’s leadership and the psychiatrists they employed had failed in their attempts to screen potential volunteers.

The sun came out.  The landscape had been rinsed clean by the rain which left in its wake lush greens, the rust red of the soil, a blue sky so intense and ablaze with light it hurt the eyes.  We slowed at another intersection.  A flat-roofed two-story structure squatted at the right-hand corner.  It looked abandoned, the once-white walls stained with dark streaks of mold.  The structure, obviously a residence, was much more imposing than any I had seen along our journey to Waterloo.  A lane ran alongside the house climbing into the rain forest of the Colony hills.  On the other side of the highway, the lane became a road that crossed the narrow-gauge tracks of the railway that connected Freetown with the country’s second largest city Bo.  The train for Bo had a legendary record of unreliability that had been captured in a Krio song we had learned during our training: “The train for Bo, i no wan gri for go.”  Beyond the tracks a few tin roofs were visible among the trees.  Could this be Waterloo, I wondered.

Ron turned to the right up the one-way lane that passed the abandoned house, down shifting into second gear.  He still hadn’t spoken.  We passed into a canopy of thick forest, the Jeep revving and clattering when he double-clutched into first as we rounded a steep bend. Suddenly we came upon a small bungalow off to the left.  

Ron nosed the Jeep into the drive finally breaking the silence.  “Be it ever so humble.”  

Home was a stucco over block structure with a metal roof, the walls streaked with mold just like the house beside the highway.  There was an attached single-car garage, but Ron parked by the back door.  Directly ahead of the Jeep was a yellow outbuilding from which emerged a bare-chested muscular young man with a broad, engaging smile.  

“Mr. Ron, you are late in coming.”

“We had some problems, Samuel.  Samuel, I want you to meet Mr. Livingston, our new teacher at Peninsula.  Mr. Livingston, this is Samuel Kargbo, one of the ‘scholars’ at the school who helps with our laundry and cleaning.”

The faint sarcasm in “scholars” evidently did not register with Samuel, for he was still beaming as he held out his hand.  It was my first African handshake and I was surprised when the hand of this finely muscled youth had all the firmness and engagement of a dead fish.

“You will be teaching us science, Mr. Livingston?” 

“I dunno,” I said, perplexed by the question and the enthusiasm behind it.  “Never taught science before.  I was told I would probably be teaching English.”

The smile dimmed.  “We have the great need for science,” he said.  “It is the scholars’ hope you will be teaching us science.”

Ron was already at the back of the Jeep, starting to unload.  “Samuel, give me a hand will you?  We’ve got to get some of this stuff in the fridge.”

“Do we have electricity?” I asked.  “I don’t see any lines.”

“Nope.”

“No lights, no stove?”

“Everything runs on kerosene—they call it ‘spirit’” Ron replied, gesturing at Samuel.

“How does a fridge run on kerosene?”

“Black magic.  I’ll try to explain it to you sometime, but let’s get this crap unloaded.”
                                        

Part of the crap was my clothes crammed into the duffle bag.  A sea chest containing the rest of my belongings was on its way by boat.  Time of arrival?  There were no reliable answers to that question; Carter had estimated six weeks.  The bag was wedged behind the ruined tire, its former whiteness smeared black and red.  I struggled to yank it out without removing the tire.     
                                       

Samuel came up beside me, half brushing me aside.  “Please sir, I am after getting that.”  His skin glistened, the sheen of sweat highlighting the muscles of his body.  Removing the tire first and setting it on the ground, he shouldered the bag and carried it inside while I trailed after him, empty handed, the master and his coolie.

The back door led into the kitchen.  Sure enough, in the corner next to the door stood a Whirlpool refrigerator, which from appearances resembled exactly its electric stateside cousins.  Ron was busy filling the shelves and the freezer on top.  Some of the meat he had set aside to cook immediately.  Next to the fridge was a peculiar cabinet enclosed in screen wire, the legs standing in empty Bumble Bee tuna cans filled with water.

       Ron saw me staring at it.  “That’s the pantry.”  He pointed at the tuna cans.  “Supposed to keep the ants out.”  

Along an adjoining wall was a once white sink stained rust-red.  A three-burner kerosene stove—but no oven—completed the array of kitchen appliances.  In the far corner a tall ceramic cylinder stood atop a small table.  

“Water filter,” Ron explained.  “All our cooking and drinking water has to be boiled, then filtered.  Damn water is loaded with parasites and iron which you’ll see on the filters if you lift the lid.” 

So the red stains on the sink were probably not rust.

“Check out the rest of the place.  There’s not much to it.  This used to be the Assistant D.C.’s place.  Clifford, our headmaster, lives in the former D.C.’s residence up on top of the hill.  Malcolm invited us to dinner tonight, so you’ll get a chance to see how the English gentry were accustomed to living.  They say the grounds alone used to require sixty laborers to maintain.  It’s all grown over now.  Clifford employs one toothless Pa, Maliki, to hack at the grass with a machete, but he spends most of his time sleeping in the undergrowth.”

The living area, the most spacious area of the house, opened onto a porch.  The furnishings were Spartan: a desk pushed against one wall and two leather easy chairs, cracked and stained by years of wear.  There were no pictures or mementos on the walls, just a topographical map of the world. I glanced in the bathroom off the hallway between the living area and the single bedroom: the fixtures—a bathtub, sink, and toilet—were all stained red like the kitchen sink.  

The bedroom was small; four wires ran across the room holding up the mosquito nets draped around each bed.  The closet ran the length of one side of the room, and Ron had pushed aside his clothes to make way for mine.  A small dresser placed against one wall separated the beds.  A small bedroom, a living room, one bath, and a crowded kitchen—so this would be “home.”  From the look of it, one prerequisite for the Assistant D.C. must have been confirmed bachelorhood.  Not that this was like the cramped quarters of a university dorm. But since my sister was ten years older than me, I had basically been raised as an only child.   I already sensed I would have to tread carefully to avoid invading my roommate’s space, especially since the whole place had been his alone for a year.

Steel casement windows securely anchored in the block walls hung open, the hinges rusted.  The front and back doors were also steel, with barred windows at the top.  The place resembled a mini-fortress.  There were no screens.  I felt simultaneously a sense of security and confinement that recalled one of my favorite snatches of poetry, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out.”

I retraced my steps and went out the front door to the porch.  The front of the house, if it could be said to be the front was elevated atop a stem wall due to the steepness of the hill.  It could have afforded a marvelous view, but most of the view was blocked by rain forest.  One small space had been cleared where the flat upcountry plain could be seen as it stretched into obscuring haze. 

This would be my window on Africa for the next two years.  The prospect of spending that much time on this hill seemed daunting: away from my real home, from friends, from Diane—the girl I had dated at the University of Missouri, whose company I still longed for in the reflective intervals of my new adventure—away from the creature comforts of the American middle-class.  Yet there was also an exhilarating expansiveness: here I could be my own man, with a vocation, a place to call home which was not so nearly as primitive as I had expected, and something to prove—that I could responsibly represent the United States and my President who had launched a new and daring initiative on the world’s stage, especially in the third world, bringing to the them, in the name of peace, the path to prosperity and the happiness that would be theirs with a better way of life.

My stomach was growling.  It was nearly 1:00 p.m.  A musical blend of voices came from the forest on the garage side of the house.  A troupe of seven women, each burdened with a heavy load of firewood balanced on her head, emerged, headed for a path into the forest at the edge of the clearing in front of the house.  Jabbering, giggling as they coyly glanced sidelong in my direction, they rushed headlong down the hill until the forest swallowed up the sound of their voices.

Chapter 4

My stomach was growling the next morning—a little hunger, a little anxiety—as we raced down the highway toward Peninsula Secondary School.  Ron and I had overslept.  Samuel, already dressed in his freshly washed uniform, white shirt and gray shorts, had awakened us, his brow glistening with sweat, his face nearly radiant with anticipation. 

We skipped the ritual of breakfast; I grabbed a banana as we raced out the door.  Ron informed me Clifford was a stickler for punctuality, the lack of which, he deemed, was the reason Africans were not ready to join the council of world citizens.  I was apprehensive, a thousand scenarios of the first day flashing through my head.  My liberal arts degree was small comfort; my only classroom experience had been a stint as an assistant in a Botany lab my senior year at Mizzou.  Stage fright loomed in my fantasies of standing before a class of some thirty students.

The school was located at an intersection about a mile and a half further down the road leading to Bo.  Uniformed students walking along the highway waved at the Jeep as we passed.  They didn’t seem too concerned about the prospect of being late.  

In my head I kept going over the previous night’s dinner conversation in the former D.C.’s residence, now inhabited by the headmaster and his wife.  Malcolm Clifford was English. He had a master’s degree in history from the University of Reading.   Having lived abroad for almost a dozen years, much of that time in Liberia, he had only the barest of accents, though his speech was seasoned with words peculiar to the British lexicon.  He was thin, close to six feet tall, probably in his late thirties. A nervous energy radiated from his movements and especially his conversation.  He was garrulous, though not overbearing.  It was obvious that, although he was intelligent and erudite, his spiritual beliefs had a tether on his intellect.  But he didn’t proselytize, at least not on the occasion of this first meeting.  He laughed frequently at his own wit, clamping his teeth over his lower lip, displaying a grayish maxillary incisor and often issuing a spray of saliva when struck by the humorous irony of what he had witnessed while living and working in West Africa.  

Frida, his wife, was a near rendering of the Swedish stereotype: tall, blonde, a face as plain and white as fresh cut lumber.  She wore a poly/cotton print dress which had been washed to a sheerness that only thinly veiled the secrets of her body, especially a midriff which pooched like an inviting pillow where a man might surely want to rest his head.  

They had one very spoiled five-year-old, Gavin.  Precocious and uninhibited, Gavin bossed the servants around in fluent Krio, a feat which his parents hadn’t mastered. 

The Cliffords were Seventh Day Adventist missionaries, who followed the church’s strict vegetarian precepts.  They asked Gavin to say grace before the meal, but he was adamant in his refusal.  So the honor reverted, after a moment’s tension, to Malcolm, who praised God for the bounty before us, thanked Him for my safe delivery to Waterloo, especially to Peninsula Secondary School.  God was also petitioned for guidance in the school year that would begin the following day.  The meal was a first for me, but I was pleasantly surprised by Frida’s creativity in disguising what I had always considered the bland, unsavory appeal of vegetables.

Malcolm was a pleasant, likeable fellow without the religious zeal I expected from a missionary, especially one who was willing to forsake what I considered a normal diet in order to nourish his spirit.  He asked me if I had any teaching experience, and I told him of my brief stint in the Botany lab.

“What was your major?”

“Creative Writing.”

“That’s curious.”

“Why?”  I suspected the English might equate my degree with something akin to underwater basket weaving.

“Well, for one, the Ministry of Education promised to send us a science teacher from this latest crop of Volunteers.  We’re desperate for a science master, you see.  We’re in the process of building a lab at the school and the students are anxious to begin hands on experiments.  Despite the fact I’m a history major, I’d take on the job myself.  But given my duties as headmaster, I simply don’t have the time.  Did you take any other science courses at university?”

“Actually, when I first entered college, I thought I wanted to be an Electronics Engineer, so I had to take Chemistry and Physics.”

“There, you see.  How fortuitous!  Any experience ordering lab supplies? . . . I ask because the government of Sierra Leone has given us £200 for supplies, and the Peace Corps has promised to match that amount.”

“No,” I confessed.  “I’m afraid I wasn’t very good in either subject.  In fact, that’s why I decided to switch majors.”

“Quite a change to be sure . . . but no problem for you Americans, I suspect.  I shouldn’t think there’s much to making up an order: just the basics—Bunsen burners, petri dishes, flasks, chemicals, that sort of thing.  I was going to order the supplies myself, but since the Ministry of Education promised me a science teacher, I put it off.  

“Don’t get your expectations too high as far as the quality of the students at Peninsula.  Am I right, Ron?”

Ron nodded, but I sensed some reluctance in his assent.

“We’re just beginning a second form this year,” Malcolm continued.  “Only five of our students have government scholarships.  They all fancy themselves ‘scholars,’ a title which fuels their sense of self-importance but means very little in the world beyond Africa.  Unfortunately, the best students go to the more prestigious secondary schools in Freetown that have six forms.”

“What about Mohamed Mansaray?” Ron asked.

“Ah yes, Mohamed.  Well, as they say, the exception proves the rule.  Rare young man; he would do well anywhere.  It’s a shame he can’t afford to get into a school like the Albert Academy.”

Malcolm appeared to ignore Ron’s challenge and looked at me again.

“For that matter, don’t expect too much of your African counterparts.  I’m afraid there’s too much emphasis on rote learning: monkey-see, monkey-do sort of thing, very little independent or critical thinking.  And they are apt not to spare the rod.  The irony is Africans are most keen on aping the very culture they were bent on declaring their independence from.

“Ron, you remember how Koker and Kande were so insistent at our last faculty meeting in June that the students be required to buy school caps this year?  They kept claiming the boys were ashamed of the school because we have no school caps. Silly nonsense; it’s all for show and the students simply can’t afford it.”

This time there was no response from Ron.  He looked annoyed by Malcolm’s presumption that his role was seconding these offhand remarks about the students and teachers.  I was feeling embarrassed since all of this conversation was carried on within earshot of the three “scholars” whom the Cliffords employed to clear the table and wash the dishes.

As we pulled into the parking lot that first day of school several students, who were already milling around the school grounds, ran up to the Jeep on Ron’s side.  I was a little bewildered by this reception, given Ron’s callous treatment of the old hitchhiker and his family and especially by his recommendation that Waterloo be razed.  But as we walked toward the headmaster’s office surrounded by friendly, boisterous young people vying for his attention, there was little doubt about his popularity. 

I began sizing up the school where I would be teaching the next two years.  The parking lot, I would soon learn, though it provided space for a dozen or so vehicles, normally held only two: the headmaster’s boxy, blue Vauxhall sedan and our even boxier Jeep.  African teachers could not afford the luxury of a car on the pittance they earned.

The lot was simply a bare space at the head of a large open field that separated two sets of concrete block classroom buildings.  The two buildings on the left closest to the highway had been stuccoed and painted a pastel blue.  Their corrugated steel roofs were cantilevered over sidewalks that ran along the front of each building.   As I would soon discover, the roofs were angled so steeply the overhang afforded little protection from rain or blazing sun.  Behind them was an outhouse, then the open field, and on the other side of the field, a single longer classroom building still under construction.  Its walls still hadn’t been stuccoed and there was no roof, though steel rafters had already been placed.   This, I would later learn, was to hold the science lab and a Home Economics/Arts and Crafts classroom.  The campus would have seven classrooms when this building was occupied. 

School began with morning worship, an assembly outside the headmaster’s office at the end of one of the blue classroom buildings.  The students were standing idly in a chaotic mass across the area in front of the headmaster’s office.  Ron had warned me of the tedious ritual that began each day: a hymn or two, a short homily, and then the day’s announcements.  Thankfully, neither he nor I was ever prevailed upon to lead these services.  Our role was to stand at attention on the sidewalk that elevated the staff above the assembled student body.   Either Headmaster Clifford or one of the Seventh Day Adventist teachers rotated in the role of leading the service.  Mr. Koker, a slight, peppery African, dressed in white shirt and tie led the service that would open the 1962-63 school year.  His first task was to bring order to the hundred or so scholar wannabes wandering willy-nilly before us.  This he accomplished with a bell in one hand and menacing wooden pointer in the other.  

The chattering black faces were herded into ranks according to form levels: the so-called “Prep Class,” then Forms I and II.  Prep students matriculated in limbo, having flunked the West African Exam (often two or three times) given at the end of primary school.  This was the exam that allowed them passage into the first form of secondary school.  Koker was the Prep Class Master, so he had little stature with the students of Forms I and II; in fact, they seemed to regard him with open contempt.

A few hymnals were passed among the rows of students and, after assuring himself that the “scholars” were dutifully silent, Mr. Koker held forth in a long, obsequious prayer, during which God was praised for having finally delivered a Science Master to Peninsula, Dr. Patterson.  Patterson was Ron’s last name.  Ron glanced in my direction with a knowing wink; evidently white people looked enough alike to be indistinguishable.  My stomach growled again and I could feel my face reddening at the honorary title bestowed so cavalierly by my new African colleague.  As I looked out at the assembly, I saw that not all heads were bowed, but when my eyes met the offenders, they quickly looked down, covert smiles of guilt and mischief lighting up their faces. 

Koker began to lead the group in an off-key acappella offering:

“Lord in the morning Thou shalt hear

My voice ascending high;

To Thee will I direct my prayer,

To Thee lift up mine eye . . .”

It was a pious, even if strident, offering that floated up into the palm trees and the blue void beyond, one I would soon find tiresome but also, in some strange way, come to value as anchoring my presence in West Africa each week day for the next two years.  There was a melancholy passion in the voices of these young people, a passion that drowned out the squabbling voices and dissonant horns of commerce at the intersection on the highway.  It wasn’t hard to imagine a benign, perhaps even grateful God smiling down upon this well-intentioned show of piety.

The first business of that day was making sure the students were properly registered and, more importantly, had paid their fees or had made arrangements so that payment would be forthcoming.  Alongside a few of the names in the ledger was a note: “Send to headmaster.”

I was assigned a classroom next to the Prep Class.  The air in the room was close; the jalousie windows whose panes opened and shut like venetian blinds were supposed to improve ventilation but the air was oppressively still that morning.  About 30 students were stuffed into the cramped space that should have held no more than 20.  A few had no chairs to sit in, so they stood along the back and side walls in front of the windows, adding to the room’s stuffiness.  I sat at a crude table, motioning to the students to come up one by one.  

The long dead metaphor about a sea of faces was resurrected in my mind.  I summoned students to the table instructing each to give me his or her name.  After I had checked their fee status, they then retreated into anonymity once more in their seats or against the wall.  Tall, short, bone-skinny, obese, male, female, some possessing the matured bodies of young men and women, others pre-pubescent creatures whose intelligence, not age, had allowed them to bypass Prep Class and whose fearful eyes seemed to plead for the loco parentis of elementary school.  

But they were all black, and my mind could not fix the uniqueness that would stamp the identity of each face.  Boys slightly outnumbered the girls.  The girls wore gray skirts instead of shorts.  The difference in sexes should have helped in my attempts to grasp their identities, but in the crowded classroom it was merely the catalyst for shyness and giggling.  They spoke English, but in accents and inflections that made their words barely recognizable.  Likewise the names were unfamiliar: no Smith or Jones, Clark or Baker.  It was Bangura, Kamara, Sesay, Galba-Bright, Kanu, Fangawa, Kainesse, Kargbo, Koroma, Conteh, Mbriwa, Koker, Cline-Decker.  Vowels and consonants often jammed together in no recognizable pattern.  “K” possessed a distinct plurality as the beginning letter of the last name, and there were more Kamara’s than any other name among the K’s.  I soon discovered Peninsula Secondary School was a tribal melting pot with a few Krio thrown in for good measure.

So I devised a simple, failsafe system.  Each anonymous face would spell his/her name: K-A-M-A-R-A,  C-O-N-T-E-H.  I mean, how was I to know one began with a K, the other with a C?  So the machinery of registration moved ahead at the agonizing pace of an inch-worm.  The students were growing restive; other classes had already completed the process, and they had been released to entertain themselves outside.  A hacky sack game was begun on the sidewalk alongside my classroom. I was only on my twelfth name when Mr. Koker stuck his face in the doorway.

“All right!  All right!  What’s going on here?  Who wants a flogging, eh?”

At that moment, I was somewhat invisible, hidden behind three students standing at the desk, one waiting to be registered, a girl asking to be excused to the loo, and a third protesting my attempts to “Send to the headmaster,” as the note beside his name instructed.  He insisted plaintively that the government had promised a scholarship.  He was from “upcountry”; he had traveled far, was out of money and living on the benevolence of distant relatives.  What was he to do?

“I’m trying to finish registering the students,” I piped to Koker’s inquiry.

“Oh, Dr. Patterson, please excuse.  My apologies . . . the children are so noisy.  I could hear them next door.”

This accusation raised a perceptible murmur among the seated and standing students.  I duly noted that Mr. Koker was having the same trouble discriminating between the names of white Americans as I was having with the students.

“Uh-huh!  You see!” he spat scathingly at the class.  “You see!  So someone does want a flogging?”

At this remark, the murmur became louder.  “All right!  All right . . . please excuse, Dr. Patterson.”

“Livingston,” I said.  “Mr. Livingston.”

“So sorry Dr. Livingston.  You are having some problem?”

“I’m having trouble with the names . . . the pronunciation.”

“Yes?  So sorry.  Well, carry on.  My apologies.  Do continue.”

I flipped him a bird under the table, excused the young lady to the loo, and then sent the student sans scholarship money to the headmaster.  I asked the other young lady to spell her name.  

At that, Koker snatched up the ledger in front of me.

“What’s your name?” he asked the young girl, who had one hand on her ass and the other over her mouth.  She was giggling, her head turned coyly to one side.

“What is your name?” he asked louder.

The giggling stopped.  “K-A-R-G- . . .” she began.

He grabbed her hand from her mouth and yanked her to attention.  The expression on her face shifted swiftly to alarm.

“Don’t spell to me, you little bush girl.  Do you take me for a fool?”

“Alright!  We do not spell our names here, he yelled to the class.  This is an African secondary school; it is not an elementary school.  Your name!  Be quick . . . quick!”  But she was now speechless.  “Go,” he gestured with his pointer.  “You will clean the loo this morning.”

A ripple of tittering swelled through the rest of the class.  The machinery of registration was now running along nicely, thank you, oiled by the intrepid Mr. Koker’s help.  Malcolm’s characterization the previous evening of Peninusla’s African teachers echoed in my mind.  

Mr. Koker regarded me sternly.  “Well, carry on Dr. Patterson,” he said as he made an about face and marched from the room amidst growing discord among the students.  It took a while but they finally settled down, and I resumed the registration process at the point where I had been interrupted.

“C-O-N-T-E-H.”

Thankfully, many of the Krio first names were more familiar: Samuel, Joseph, Josephine, Daniel, Cathleen, Thomas, Sarah—so many Biblical allusions.  Tribal first names, however, proved more difficult: Ahmed, Ibrahim, Alimamy, Umaru, Kei.  This was especially the case with the girls, who when asked a second time or asked to spell their names would twist and turn, cover their mouths with their hands, giggling behind the cupped fingers: K-A-D-I-A-T-U. . . .

I was still struggling with the process when Headmaster Clifford stuck his head in the door.

“How’s it coming along?” He was smiling that gray tooth smile.

Desk chairs scraped, and a few satchels fell to the floor as the room came to attention: the discord left in the wake of Koker’s visit fell to breath-catching silence.

“As you were, class,” he said smiling at them.  Those who had seats sat quietly erect; those without remained rigidly at attention.  A hushed reverence had fallen over the class.

He spoke in confidential tones to me.  “Thought I’d let you know I sent that fellow packing—the one you referred to the office.  Everything all right here?”  He ran his eyes over the students as he said this.

“I confess I’m having a little trouble with the names.”

“Quite natural, I assure you—nothing to lose sleep over.  Mind if I lend a hand?”

“Please.  I hope I didn’t hold up the rest of the school.”

“Not at all . . . absolutely no problem.”  

For reasons I hate to divulge, I felt more comfortable with this man than I had the previous evening.  I indicated the last student I had called up to the desk.  He beckoned to the young lady sitting behind the student I had just finished with.  She walked up to the desk demurely—no squirming as she stood before us, no hand over mouth, no coy giggling.  A respectful silence pervaded the room, as if the place had become hallowed ground.  The only sounds were those of the students outside and Clifford’s hushed invitation to each remaining student to come forward.  In less than fifteen minutes the task was complete.

That evening as I sat on the front porch sipping a glass of orange squash, I kept mulling over my first day.  Would I ever get the names straight?  No one had prepared me for this bump in the road.  I had reacted to Koker’s intrusion viscerally.  Flipping him a bird under the table was childish, a bit like road rage.  I hoped none of the students had seen the gesture or, if they had, didn’t comprehend its significance.  Granted, Koker had acted like a jerk, was a jerk—perhaps forever destined to be a jerk.  You flip birds at jerks.  Then I remembered Ron calling Africans idiots when we came upon the lorry in the road and Clifford’s remarks about “African colleagues.”  Had these offhand characterizations set me on the slippery downward slope where very soon all Africans might be jerks—or something worse?  

I had often feared I was predisposed to racism, which only made me more zealous to appear open minded.  My father knew no other word for black Americans than “nigger.”  There was one exception: a black man on a home remodeling crew dad supervised.  He always referred to him as Mr. Washington.  My mother didn’t use the “n” word but she, like my father, lived with the increasingly morbid fear that blacks would eventually be moving from the inner city to the lower income suburbs of St. Louis, particularly Overland, where my parents had lived for nearly thirty years.  

I had never seen a black student during my schooling until I reached high school, where half a dozen black boys and girls segregated themselves at the same lunch table each day.  I tried out for Ritenour Senior High’s fabled wrestling team—state champions for ten consecutive years (this in 1956)—and for two years struggled to earn a letter behind a young man who had held three consecutive state titles as he moved up through the weight classifications.  One day the coach summoned me to his office and explained that Andy had a bad case of the flu and might not be ready to go at our next away match in Kirkwood.  Was I ready?

“Sure coach,” I said, excited at the possibility.

He studied me closely.  “We don’t know much about the kid in your weight class, other than he’s black.  Will that be a problem?”

I was stunned.  The possibility had never entered my mind—that I might be forced into the physical intimacy that wrestling demands with a black kid.  Vague images flashed through my mind and I hesitated before saying “No” to coach.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I think I can handle it.”

By Friday, the day of the match, Andy was a little better.  Coach wasn’t going to risk the team’s reputation on my hesitation during that brief conference in his office.  Andy won easily, pinning this alien adversary in the first period, and I lost my last chance to letter.

At the university, my eyes were opened to the injustices of racism by my professors and the reading material they assigned.  During my senior year I roomed with an elderly couple who had a small house close to campus and who offered their two spare bedrooms to college males to supplement their Social Security income.  In my American Literature class I befriended a skinny, bespectacled young black man, Morris White.  He and I traded impressions when we tackled The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  As a child I had perceived the book as a truly great adventure story.  Now, under the tutelage of Professor Edwards and my new friend Morris, I began to realize the role racism played not only in Twain’s novel but in the cultural fabric of American life.  Morris related to me the many times as a child when he was teased about his last name.  When he finally confided his torment to his grandmother, she confessed she never understood why white people hated black people so much.

I took Morris home with me after class one day so we could study for an upcoming exam.  We tiptoed past the old man who owned the house while he dozed in his rocking chair on the front porch.  He stirred momentarily, trying to focus on us in his sleep-bemused mind.  He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t form as he half-muttered, half-moaned something unintelligible, drooling in the handkerchief his wife always tied about his neck.

It wasn’t until the next day when I returned from campus that I heard the hateful message he was trying to form the previous afternoon.  “Was that a nigger you brought into my house?”  

His face was contorted with a rage that took me by surprise, and when I hesitantly explained I had brought Morris into the house so we could study for an exam, he shook a threatening finger in my face: “Don’t ever bring that nigger in my house again, or by God I throw you both out on your ears!”

These were the memories that flitted in and out of my mind for the remainder of that first day at Peninsula Secondary School.  After headmaster Clifford’s help with registration, the kids were released to join their companions outside.  A soccer game (they called it football) began on the field between the classroom blocks.  It seemed two of the school’s top players were in the class I had been given the task of registering.  Without their leadership, a game could not be started.

Clifford caught my eye as I stood at the edge of the field watching the skillful ball handling of the boys.  He signaled he wanted me to come to his office.  There he handed me a heavy catalogue that detailed a confusing array of science equipment and chemicals available to secondary schools.

“Remember, we need to get this in as quickly as possible.  They say allow about six weeks for delivery which should coincide nicely with the completion of the roof on the lab building.  I’m hoping we can get some tables and benches built in the meantime.”

Lugging the catalogue back to the classroom, I thumbed through its contents.  When the students began filing back into the classroom, I laid it aside, and the remainder of the afternoon was spent distributing textbooks and tablets, and giving assignments for the following day.  I had also been blessed with the title English Master, which meant I was responsible for the 2^nd Form English and Literature classes and preparing them for the exams they would face at the end of the third form.  The composition texts and exercise books, I noted, had stories and drills set in England, and concerned the behavior and experiences of young English boys and girls.  One slender literature text caught my attention: the biography of Benga, aka Bai Bureh, a legendary figure in Sierra Leone, one of its greatest warriors and a thorn under the colonial saddle of British colonialism.  Benga was the hero of the Hut Tax War of 1898, much as George Washington was the hero of America’s rebellion against British colonialism during the Revolutionary War.  Perhaps here was a text both I and my students could relate to.

Sitting on the porch of the bungalow that evening, I watched the colorful highlights brushed on the ominous clouds hanging over the plain, their imperceptible passage from magenta to indigo.  For the brief span of almost ten minutes the heavens were transformed.  The beauty of this sight was nothing less than transcendent, one of those rare revelations when, alone, we witness the sublime splendor of planet earth and the heart is left to ache because the vision cannot be shared.

 Samuel’s shadowy outline suddenly appeared in the deepening dusk, startling me so that I nearly dropped the glass of squash.  “Please sah, I shall be coming again.”

“What?”

“I am coming again.”

I knew what he meant, but I was trying to give him time to correct his English and give myself a moment to recover from my surprise.

“Where are you going?  To Waterloo?”  I tried the musical inflection and emphasis on the last syllable the way I had heard the students pronounce it during the day.

“Yes sah,” he said, grinning broadly.

“Then you should say you are going to Waterloo, and you will return at such and such a time.”

“Yes sah.  Please sah, that is what I am saying.”

“No, you said ‘I am coming again’.”

“Yes sah.”

“That is not the same as telling me you are going now and will return later.”

“Yes sah.”

“Yes sir?  Yes sir what?”

“I am coming again, sah.”

He was still smiling, his grin a bit more sheepish now, the bright optimism clouded by this linguistic mystery.  This was a young man entering 2^nd Form.  It was clear much work lay ahead, getting these “scholars” ready for the exams that lay ahead.  Already I had learned that their futures were not so much star-crossed as pidgin-crossed by the Krio dialect.

“Have you finished your homework for tomorrow?”

“Please sah, when I am coming again.”

“Where is Mr. Patterson?”

“Na headmaster’s house.  He say tell you, he will be coming again.”

The tug of this musical language was irresistible.  I had to try my hand.  

“Okay, we go see yu bak.”

I wondered how badly I had mangled the lingua franca of Sierra Leone as Samuel waved and bounded like a young deer into the rain forest and down the hill.  He was an attractive youth, bursting with the careless energy and enthusiasm of a seventeen-year-old.  What did he do evenings in Waterloo?  Screw the local lasses?  The modest schoolgirls in my classes?  

For that matter, what would I do with my evenings for the next two years with no television, no flicks, no phones?  

And then I began to think of the days, weeks, and months stretching out before me.  How did one bide one’s time?  With no chores save preparing meals and doing dishes, grading papers and preparing lessons, how did one get father time to mount his winged chariot without chafing at the ponderous languor of these tropical nights? 

The crickets seemed to increase the volume of their noise as night fell on the mountain.  I began to think of a spring evening back in Columbia, Missouri.  It was May, my third date with Diane.  I had invited her for a walk, a serendipitous inquiry into whatever the night might hold—a walk with no particular agenda (so I said) or destination.  We ended up behind Memorial Stadium, just the two of us, a place frequented by thousands in the fall.  I hadn’t the courage to embrace her and kiss her, but I was armed with a secret weapon: I had memorized one of Shakespeare’s poems, Sonnet 18.  So there, against the background chorus of thousands of horny crickets, I recited, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.”  It was corny, hokey if you will but, though I often played the cynic, I meant to impress upon her I was at heart an incurable romantic. 

And it seemed to work, for when I finished intoning the poem’s capstone couplet, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,” I didn’t have to make the first move.  She took my face between her hands and kissed me fully on the lips.  

My heart still soared at the memory, there, watching the luminous moon climb from behind the now dark clouds, shedding its light over the black plain, lighting the western most edge of the white man’s grave, thousands of miles from the warm touch of those fingers, the incredibly soft, yielding resilience of her lips.  And I remembered the lines of another poet: 

“Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!  For the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. . . .” 

Chapter 5

In Thorton Wilder’s classic piece of Americana, Our Town, Emily Webb, who has died in childbirth, delivers a line that has always haunted me.  Looking down from the elysian afterlife upon the inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, the place where she grew up, she decides she can stand no more the piercing ache of what can never be experienced again: the ticking clocks that marked her existence on earth, the color of her mother’s sunflowers, the aromas and savory delights of food, the sense of rebirth after a hot bath or when putting on a newly ironed dress, the unreckoned rhythms of sleep and waking. 

And then, her eyes dim with tears, she looks to the play’s Stage Manager and asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

“The saints and poets maybe,” he answers softly. 

I can’t tell you how many times in the past fifty years, I wish I had “realized” each day of those two years in Sierra Leone: drank in more details, savored what I dismissed as tedium, kept more copious notes even if the devil lies in details, been more curious about what I took for granted, reflected more often on what was rather than what I hoped would be.  Never one to take many pictures, I wish I had taken more.  But, alas, the expensive 35mm. camera I bought in New York City before departure soon quit functioning because I failed to protect it that first year from the virulent humidity of Sierra Leone’s rainy season.  

As day grew into day and week into week, a routine emerged and routines, that sub-species of familiarity, breed a kind of creeping contempt for the wonder of living.  Anesthetized by the quotidian obligations of making my way in my new home, I sleep-walked through each day.   So the early months of my stay are nearly the blank slate that John Locke said we all begin life with.  Each day we rose and drove to the school.  Each noon, Ron insisted we get away from the school, so we drove back to the bungalow to eat lunch and catnap.  One thing I do remember clearly: the drive afforded entertainment that men in the States pay good money for: bare-breasted women washing their clothes in the stream that ran alongside the road to the bungalow, their chocolate globes of flesh dancing like ripe fruit in an invisible breeze as they beat their clothes upon the rocky streambed.  

Another memory was a discovery one day in a dark corner of the bedroom closet: a piece of memorabilia I had lugged all the way from St. Louis, a pair of Threadneedle wingtips, “Threads” we called them in high school.  I’m not sure what purpose I thought they’d serve in Sierra Leone, but I found them covered in mildew, as if during the night the temperature had dropped precipitously, laying down a white mantle of frost.  Their purchase had been a significant triumph over my depression-haunted parents, who at last relented to my continued nagging during my senior year in high school.  They had the signature metal taps on the toes and heels so one could slide down the polished concrete halls of Ritenour Senior High or create that loud, classy staccato clack as you walked to class.  I never wore anything but sandals that first month in Sierra Leone and so my precious Threads had been abandoned to the dank shadows of the closet.  A dress leather belt I had packed suffered a similar fate.

The rains gradually abated, the ubiquitous mildew melted away, the vivid green moss growing on the forsaken front steps of our bungalow turned to shades of gray and black, seeming to shrink as it did, and one day I became aware my camera was ruined.  The “dry season,” a meteorological phenomenon suffered by many of the world’s tropical inhabitants, made its annual appearance.  A trade wind called the Harmattan, which some say derives from the Arabic word harān, meaning “evil thing,” began its desiccating advance from the Sahara across the coast of Western Africa.  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the sources of freshwater dried up, the air filled with a dusty haze, and people, even animals, became increasingly irritable as October slipped into November.   It was difficult to imagine that after nearly five months of daily rain the heavens, like a mother whose breasts have become barren, could yield no more, and water, not the diamonds that accounted for Sierra Leone’s meager renown, became nature’s most precious commodity.  

In Freetown, the exposed pipelines that supplied the businesses along the quays in the harbor were attacked by thirsty, impoverished residents who beat upon the cast-iron pipes with stones until they spewed forth the life-giving liquid.  In Waterloo, water simply quit flowing in the streams and communal spigots.  The water from our bungalow faucets gradually diminished to a rust-red trickle.  Each day the unvanquished sun beat down without mercy upon the riot of living things spawned by the departed rains.

But there was an upside to all of this.  One could plan outings without fear of being rained out.  Ron was a great one for outings, hikes, weekends at the marvelous beaches in Freetown.  When we drove back to school Friday afternoons after lunch, the Jeep was already packed so we could take off immediately to spend the weekend sponging off the hospitality of our mutual friends, Phil and Nolan.  It was great adventure at first.  Cavorting between the push and pull of the pounding breakers and their undertow, basking in the sun, buzzing away memories of the weekday monotony with Star beer and beach volleyball games—the beach and ocean were, to this untraveled Missouri boy, an introduction to another of nature’s unimagined wonders.  Phil was the exhibitionist, swimming out dangerously far from the beach, waving his crimson bathing trunks in the air to get everyone’s attention.  Ron scouted the beach for women; female Volunteers had no appeal for him, except the lone member of his group who had repeatedly scorned his advances.

I quickly grew tired of this weekend routine, however, especially living off the hospitality of someone else, coping with their rules and routines.  As weekend hosts Phil and Nolan were modestly generous and affable.  And I thoroughly enjoyed the wonders of Nolan’s classical record collection that he had shipped over in his one allotted steamer trunk: it was there in Sierra Leone, under Nolan’s tutelage, I first discovered the forlorn ecstasy of Mahler’s symphonies.  Yet there was always the underlying friction about food—who paid for it, what was purchased, and who prepared it—transportation, and sleeping arrangements.  Some weekends other Volunteers on R & R from upcountry crashed at their place.  When our days of play ended, an impatient queue formed at the single bathroom to shower away the gritty residue of the beach.  Nights we slept on the floor.    

On the weekends we went to Freetown, we would return to Waterloo at ten Sunday evening, too exhausted to grade papers or prepare lessons.  Ron taught only one class of English.  His specialties were P.E., Arts and Crafts, and Geography so, unlike me, he never faced the growing stack of exercise books and student writing samples waiting on my desk at the bungalow.  I found myself winging it in the classroom without a daily lesson plan, let alone a comprehensive outline of what I hoped to accomplish and how or when.  I tried not to think of the judgment day that lay ahead before I would return to the States: the comprehensive third form exams—the toll gate that would tax our scholars knowledge before they, and Peninsula Secondary, could continue on the road to the fourth and fifth forms.

On the weekends that I stayed in Waterloo, Samuel and I became more closely acquainted. The young man made his way alone in Waterloo.  According to Ron, Samuel was Mende and his mother lived upcountry in Bo, the city that had once been the provincial capital.  He had not seen his father in years and was uncertain of his whereabouts or whether he was still alive.  Somehow he sustained himself on the £15 he earned washing our clothes, sweeping the house daily with his little handheld bush broom, keeping the lanterns, refrigerator and stove topped-off with kerosene, even doing a little yard work, trimming the grass and luxuriating brush with his machete.  He wasn’t enough of a scholar to receive a government scholarship and, since he claimed to be Catholic, the Adventists’ benevolence did not extend to him. 

The staggering task that lay before me as English Master quickly became apparent when Samuel turned in his first essay.  Ron told me the kids loved to tell stories, fictional or fact-based, it didn’t seem to matter.  So one Monday in the second form English class when, due to a weekend at the beach, I had not finished grading the exercise books they had turned in the previous Friday, I asked them to write a fictional adventure about getting lost in the rain forest on the Colony mountains due west of Waterloo—a good way to kill forty-five minutes of class time.  I wasn’t able to look over these narratives until the following weekend when I decided to stay in Waterloo to catch up with the growing mountain of ungraded papers.  

Sunday afternoon I picked up a single sheet of foolscap—that’s British for standard sized writing paper—bearing Samuel’s name at the top and the title “Been Lost.”  Expecting at the very least a fragmented but spicy adventure, encounters with baboons, serpents, possibly witch doctors or unfriendly hunters, I wasn’t prepared for this:

All though I don’t know were I am, but I am lost.  Morover, I ca’nt find my way.  As you all know, lost is not been found.  To my own way of thinking I have being lost that is to unable once way.  Not long I met a tree were the coarse bend.  I bend to and imediately on the way going I hard like beating.  I pay God to safe me home.

That was it.  For Samuel, losing one’s way in the English language proved easier than getting lost in the Colony mountains.  This torturous, truncated narrative was the fruit of almost 45 minutes of effort.  Up to that point, I had taken their writing skills for granted.  We had confined our English lessons to fill-in-the-blank exercises which took less time to grade, especially since some of the scholars’ cursive flirted with illegibility.  

I stared in disbelief at the aborted narrative.  “Samuel!” I yelled.  Where and how would one begin to evaluate the thing I held out before me as if handling a soiled diaper.

There was no answer to the summons.  I waited, my brain boiling—the pedant’s righteous indignation.  Still no answer.  I stuck my head out the front door and yelled again.  “Samuel!”

Finally the sound of bare feet pounding rapidly on the path between his living quarters and the kitchen door reached my ears.  I turned as he appeared behind me dressed only in shorts, a sheen of sweat glossing the muscles rippling under his flesh.

“Come here,” I said, gesturing to the desk.  “Look at this.”

He came and stood beside me, so close his naked arms and legs grazed mine.

“Did you write this?”

“Please sir—” The customary beaming smile was gone, replaced by a hangdog look.

“Don’t ‘please sir’ me.  Did you write this?”

He studied the paper I had laid on the desk carefully.  “I am thinking so, sir.”

“What do you mean you are thinking so?  Did you write this piece of crap.”  The word shot out of my mouth before my sensitivity censors could bleep it.

Samuel stared into my face with a cross of astonishment and fear.  I didn’t know if he recognized the word, but he was evidently familiar with the tone it was delivered in.

“Yes sir, please sir—” 

“How could you write such nonsense?  The Prep students could do better than this!”

I knew from the wounded look, this last remark cut deeper than “crap.”  There is nothing like prestige and rank in an African school boy’s mind.  Samuel, being in the second form, considered himself someone to be looked up to for having swum so far upstream in his schooling even if it was the B stream—he was, after all, a second form student in a secondary school that had, at that time, only two forms.

“How do you expect to pass the third form exams writing like this?”

He looked at the paper ponderously.  “Please sir, the time was very short.”

“Hello in there,” I said, rapping my knuckles on his head.  “I gave you forty-five minutes and this is all you could do?”

He looked to one side, not altogether abject, but clearly crestfallen.  

“Hello in there!”  I had an echo, but it was Headmaster Clifford’s voice.  The heat of embarrassment, as heat is obliged to act, rose to my face.  Had he been listening? 

“Anybody home?”

“In here,” I said.  Samuel suddenly stood at attention.

Clifford came in grinning like Wonderland’s Cheshire cat.  “Stephen,” he said somewhat breathlessly, “thought maybe nobody was home.”  He nodded in Samuel’s direction.  “Samuel.”

Clifford had a way of greeting an African as though he had already dismissed all thought of actually conversing with him.  His standard salutation on the school compound was a grim head-down smirk as he plunged between buildings, but I had yet to see him actually talking with students.  His communication with them appeared to begin and end with the announcements made at morning assembly.

“Afternoon sir,” Samuel answered politely.

“Didn’t see the Land Rover outside.  Thought maybe you chaps weren’t back from Freetown.”  Clifford persisted in calling the Jeep a Land Rover, just as he called the hood a “bonnet” and the windshield a “windscreen,” words that made me often think that English in the mouth of a Brit. could be almost as daunting as Krio.  

 Samuel slipped quietly from the room as Clifford settled himself in the only easy chair, his eyes traveling around the room as if inspecting it.

“I decided to stay here and get some grading done this weekend.  Ron isn’t back yet.”

“Yes, well Ron is very fond of the good life, isn’t he?”

I handed Samuel’s composition to him, wondering as I did why I felt compelled to have a second opinion.  Forecasting Clifford’s response wasn’t difficult and I was already absorbed in the guilt I felt for overreacting to the young man’s abysmal writing skills.  After all, I had no prior knowledge of their ability to compose writing assignments.  I was just as much the culprit, having given the assignment without proper introduction simply because I wasn’t prepared for class.

He sat there holding the paper as the far-sighted will do, that detestable smile flickering across his face as he read.

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  Do these chaps have a clue . . . ?”  He shook his head as he scanned the paper again.

“‘There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,’” he quipped, handing the paper back.

I gathered this was some arcane quote lifted from the annals of English literature.

“Samuel is a good sort, proficient at football but not much of a scholar I’m afraid.  It’s all, how do they say, ‘look-see pidgin’ to him. You’re in for a real surprise should you ever sit Konde or Koker down to compose something.  I dare say this equals anything they could muster.  Half the classes Koker sleeps through, the other half he speaks to them in Krio.  

“What are these poor buggers in for?” he said, shaking his head.

I don’t know what annoyed me more: my guilt for having shown Clifford the paper or his apparent detachment.  Though I was the de facto English Master, Clifford taught Form II A stream English.  He had a stake in this.  “Do your students write like this?”

“Not quite.  There’s a glimmer of hope in some, like Mohamed Mansaray, Mariama and  Daniel Conteh—”

“Will they pass the exams next year?”

“Well, old boy, we certainly hope so.  I’m counting on you to do your best between now and then.  Don’t waste too much time with the subtleties of the King’s English, but at least drill them on the salient aspects of its grammar.  The exams actually give the most weight to précis writing rather than narrative of this sort.  

“As you can see, we have our work cut out.  Anyway, that’s what the exams are for—weed out the weak links.”

He dropped the mixed metaphor without apology or excuse, but it gave me pause coming from Clifford.

“What is ‘praysee’?”

“I believe you chaps call it an ‘abstract.’  That’s what it was called in Liberia, though they didn’t give it much emphasis.  Rephrasing the main idea of a writing passage, its supporting points . . . composing them in an abbreviated but coherent summary, that sort of thing.  Very important when you sit the exams.”

  “Is that what you practice in your English class—précis?”

“Why, yes.  Weren’t you told that in your training?”

“No.  We were told the students spoke and wrote English.”

Clifford brayed at my unintended irony.  “Well, you’ll just have to keep a stiff upper pecker about these kinds of things,” he grinned.

What the hell did that mean?  Surmising Clifford wasn’t the type to drop obscene innuendos, I decided to inquire another time.

“Tell you why I dropped in.  Fine afternoon for a walk, of course, but I also wanted to know if you and Ron could lend a hand tomorrow.  A lorry will be delivering tables for your science lab.   Had them made locally to save money but, unfortunately, didn’t save enough to get the benches made.  So we’ll have tables, but, for the time being, nothing for the students to sit on.  I’m anxious to get them in now that the roof is on the lab.  At least we can secure them so they don’t become firewood in the hands of the villagers.”

“No problem as far as I’m concerned.  I’m sure Ron won’t mind.  What time?”

“Well, they said nine o’clock, but that’s West African time, so I figure sometime around noon.  I can have Konde and Koker keep an eye on your classes while you help.”

Why not have them help unload the tables, I wondered?

He surprised me when he said, “You’re probably wondering why I don’t ask Konde and Koker.  I’m afraid African professionals, especially marginal ones like those two, are not much help when it comes to manual labor.  They consider it beneath the dignity of their profession.”

* *

The tables didn’t actually arrive the following day, nor the next, nor the day after that.  The lorry hauling them finally chugged into the parking lot about noon, the time Clifford had predicted, only a week later. They were large and unwieldy, so we had a difficult time getting them through the lab door.  Distributed in the echoing space of the unfinished lab, they looked a bit forlorn, like biers in a mortuary, the tabletops nearly four feet off the floor.  Clifford acknowledged they had been made ridiculously high and floated the idea of cutting the legs off.  

As I surveyed the chest high tables that the students would have to stand beside, an idea struck: perhaps instead of cutting the legs off and waiting to have separate benches specially built, why not attach seats directly to the tables in the manner of a picnic bench.  Cross supports could be attached to the legs of the tables and long two-by-tens nailed to these supports to provide seating.  

I suspected the idea would appeal to Clifford, for they were planning a week-long revival at the school the following week.  The first hour of each day would be given over to a religious assembly which the entire school would attend.  Guest speakers had been invited, including the president of the mission in Sierra Leone, as well as a visiting minister from the U.S.  The Arts and Crafts room adjoining the lab was the logical place to have these assemblies for it was almost three times the size of any classroom, large enough to squeeze the entire student body into, plus the few visitors from Waterloo.  Benches for this occasion were to be hauled over from the Waterloo Adventist church.    

Clifford wanted badly to show off his science lab, especially since the supply order I had made was due to arrive shortly.  The fiscal officers of the Adventist hierarchy both in Sierra Leone and the home office predicted a lab could not be constructed on the monies Clifford had available.  Yet here it was, nearly ready to occupy, if only there were benches.

So I made an offer: if he could get the lumber, I was certain I could attach seats to the tables over a weekend.  If I needed help, Ron could give me a hand though I knew he wouldn’t readily relinquish a weekend at the beach, especially just to make Clifford look good in the eyes of his superiors.  I revealed my father had been a carpenter and that, from an early age, I had been handy with the basic tools of the trade.  If he could get me some of those tools—hammer, saw, measuring tape—I could build his seats.  Clifford, though he had promised Frida and Gavin an outing to the seaside village of York that weekend, offered to postpone the trip so he could lend a hand on Sunday, but I assured him I could do the job alone and would prevail on Samuel to help if the need arose.   

My offer, however, still put Clifford temporarily in a quandary: should he allow me to work on Saturday, the Adventist Sabbath, on the school grounds?   He wanted to show off the new building despite its incompleteness: no ceiling, no running water, no gas supply for those Bunsen burners he had me order.  But he was rightfully proud of what he had managed to construct on Peninsula’s woeful budget.    

Could I be discreet in my work on the Sabbath?  Yes.  I would cut the lumber on the Sabbath: since there was no electricity anyway, the cutting would be done without the loud, annoying whine of a circular saw.  The nailing could then be done on Sunday.

Knowing that Clifford would not visit the campus on the Sabbath, I asked Samuel if he wanted to help me on both Saturday and Sunday.  I was surprised how readily he forgave my harangue about his writing abilities and how he beamed with pride when he learned that he alone, of all the scholars, would be working side-by-side with me to complete the furnishing of the science lab.  I cautioned him that he was sworn to secrecy about our work on Saturday, the Adventists’ Sabbath.

Despite his abject writing abilities, Samuel, as I suspected, was a quick study in manual skills, though there was more swagger than substance in his avowed knowledge of carpentering.  He liked to anticipate what needed doing rather than stand around waiting to be told, which led to a number of redo’s but also put our overall progress ahead of schedule.  We had easily completed the seats early Sunday afternoon.

When Clifford arrived at the school Monday morning, I gave him a quick peek at the fruits of our labor.  Sliding into one of the seats, he silently surveyed the room, a genuine smile of pride and satisfaction thawing the lips customarily frozen in that sardonic grin.  

“Good show,” he said at last, then more enthusiastically, “Well done!”

 He hesitated again.  “I have a confession. I really didn’t think you could pull it off.  But this? . . .  Jolly good show, old man.”

I knew in that moment I had bagged more brownie points with the headmaster of Peninsula Secondary School than Ron had managed to score in a year. 

But my newly-won stature in his eyes was short-lived, the thin-filmed bubble of vanity soon punctured.  First, I was a fool to think that Samuel could possibly keep his role in this project, especially his work on the Sabbath, a secret.  For this trespass, I received a fatherly though not stern lecture from headmaster Clifford which left my ears bright red.  Six days shalt thou labor.  On the seventh, the Lord rested.  Those made in His likeness were obliged to do likewise.  It was written in stone.  Though I chafed somewhat at this rebuke, I took it in the spirit of fatherly advice, recognizing that it was I who had broken the letter of my original agreement with Clifford: Samuel was not to help me on the Sabbath.  Yet the more I thought about the whole affair, the more hypocritical it seemed: it was alright for me to work but not Samuel, who was, after all, Catholic.  Furthermore, the Lord’s will on this matter seemed a bit fickle when even Christians couldn’t reach common accord about which day should be designated the Sabbath.  

I have never comprehended, even after a lifelong career as ateacher, the impact my story telling might have on others.  When I told Ron of Clifford’s summons and subsequent reprimand for working with Samuel on a Saturday, he went ballistic.  My wounded ego and sense of injustice, tilted slightly in their orbit by Star beer, spiced the telling of my meeting with Clifford.

“So what did he say about your benches?”  Ron asked.

“He bawled me out for working on the Sabbath.”

“He what?”  Ron’s eyes exploded into wide-eyed disbelief, the whites visible in full testosterone-fueled orbit.

“Well, he didn’t really bawl me out—”

“He didn’t get down on his hands and knees and thank you?”

My retreat into the martyr’s reticence had been flanked.  “No, but—”

“That ungrateful bastard.  It’s time I had it out with him mano a mano.  You bust your butt trying to make him look good and he has the nerve to bust your balls about the Sabbath?  Hell, missionaries can’t even make up their minds which day is the Sabbath.  What gets me so goddamned mad is there’s no separation of church and state.  These . . . these ‘banana republics’ like Sierra Leone give missionaries carte blanche permission to brainwash their youth.”

I wasn’t sure why I wanted to ingratiate myself with Clifford.  Still, I feared if Ron openly attacked him, his opening volley would be Clifford’s lack of gratitude for my labor to build seats even if it had been on the Sabbath.  That might seem like I had betrayed the confidence of Clifford’s little lecture.  But I hadn’t long to stew over that possibility, for on Monday, just after morning assembly, Ron confronted him. 

Ms. Conte, the French and Home Economics teacher, was talking with Clifford in the outer office when Ron barged in.  It was she and Ron who later filled me in on the particulars.

“Headmaster, I’d like a word with you!” Ron said, herding Clifford into the quasi-privacy of the inner office.

“I’ve put up with the religious prerogatives of this school for over a year now: all this morning worship nonsense and slipping in a little proselytizing under the guise of Religious Knowledge  classes . . . the whole Adventist rigmarole at Peninsula—”

“Have you?”  Clifford’s response was saccharin with sarcasm.

“Yeah—so I’ve already complained.  But I’m going to do more than complain this time.  You’re using school time and school facilities to promote the denominational agenda of the Adventists with this so-called ‘Religion in Life’ week.  That sermon your guest speaker gave in my Arts and Crafts room this morning was the same old hour-of-decision formula I’ve heard in tents back in the States.  I don’t think the Ministry of Education would be too happy to know a revival was being held in one of their secondary schools.”

“And you want to tell them.”

“You’re doggone right—I intend to tell them.  This entire charade is an insult to non-denominational staff members like myself.  We were hired to teach, not preach or be preached to.  Whatever happened to the separation of church and state?  Three-fourths of these kids are not even Adventists.  Half of them are Muslims!  What right do you have to brain-wash them with this soul soap?”

“I suppose, then, you had best inform them.  But let me remind you this is not a public school.  It is designated an Adventist mission by the Ministry and as such the church is granted clear ‘prerogatives’ as you call them in the instruction of its students.”

“Only you, Koker, and Kande are Adventists, and less than a quarter of the student body.  So explain to me how the Ministry arrives at such designations,” Ron shot back.

“The Sierra Leone government has a contract with the Adventist Foreign Mission that in return for funding and leadership, our denomination is granted authority to establish certain standards for the spiritual guidance of the mission community.”

At this point, Conte said Ron began shouting.  “You call Koker and Kande leadership?  Hell, even you belittle them.”

“Koker and Kande happen to be members of the local Adventist church.  They are government employees, not mission employees.”

“So the Adventists supply just you—pay your salary, am I right?”

“That is correct,” Clifford said quietly.

“And just how much does the church put into funding the school other than your salary?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“Well, I’ll tell you how much.  The government allotted three thousand pounds for building and maintenance last year.  The Adventist contribution was less than five hundred pounds.  The Peace Corps pays the salaries of Stephen and myself, the government pays for Koker, Kande, Conte, and Sesay.”

A long silence followed.  Then Clifford spoke.  “I don’t think this discussion is going to be profitable to either of us, Mr. Patterson.  You already seem to think you are well informed.  You’ve made your feelings quite clear.  If you wish to take these matters up with the Ministry, I suggest you do so.  And now I must bid good-day to you, sir.  I have work to do.”

“Just a damn minute!  I’m not through.  There are certain ‘prerogatives’ I intend to start exercising.  From now on any of my students who miss the first period this week because they’re attending these so-called ‘Religion in Life’ meetings are going to be treated like any other truant—no credit and no make-up for the day’s work.

“And another thing!  From now till the end of this school year, my classes begin promptly at eight o’clock.  I’m no longer going to attend pre-school worship, and students who trail into my classes after eight because of Koker’s long-winded prayers will be sent with a machete to cut grass on the compound.”

Clifford’s forearms were resting on the desk before him, his hands connected by a lead pencil—his thumbs pressing against the backside of the pencil as if he were testing its pliability.

“You seem to think your services are indispensable,” he said, in carefully whetted tones.  “That because there is a shortage of qualified teachers in Sierra Leone, you can do and say as you please.  But let me tender you this piece of advice—don’t push too hard.  Don’t think you can use your ideas of education or what you consider the inalienable rights of teachers and students as bargaining points. 

“I’m a missionary and this is a government-sanctioned mission school.  The spiritual maturity of the students here is my concern as well as their education in secular matters.  Their instruction in matters not pertaining to religion can be an asset to this maturity; it can also, if not properly administered, cause spiritual bankruptcy, and they were better left to the ignorance we found them in.  

“You were placed here by the government in a contractual agreement with the United States Government to teach within the established framework of this mission.  There are other schools where you can be reassigned.  Believe me, I prefer being short-handed to handcuffed.”

“You haven’t got the balls to get rid of me,” Ron shouted in his face.

The pencil snapped.  Clifford looked at the broken halves in surprise.  

“Mr. Patterson, I consider your language an insult to your mentors, but I won’t let it goad me into actions I might later regret.  Let me advise you, however, I, too, intend to take this matter up with your Peace Corps superiors as well as the Ministry of Education.”

“Be my guest!” Ron yelled as he stormed from the office.

Ms. Conte told me Ron whispered to her in amazement as he left, “The guy’s nuts.  He broke his damn pencil.”

I was surprised that no mention of the seats and the Sabbath business was made, and I quizzed her about this.  But she said no one had mentioned anybody’s working on the Sabbath.  If this was correct, I was grateful to my roommate for not using me as an excuse for the confrontation.  Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was becoming more than just a spectator of the escalating acrimony between these two.  Eventually, I would have to take a side.  I also wondered just how far Ron and Clifford were going to take this war of words.  My biggest fear was I would soon be alone in the bungalow on the hill.

 I wish that had been the end of the tables and benches business.  But one final humiliation was waiting in the wings.  Unlike picnic tables whose legs run obliquely to the floor for stability, the legs of these tables were perpendicular, a fact I had not taken into account in my brilliant scheme to attach the seats to the legs.  I began holding classes in the science lab because it was more spacious and better ventilated, and all went well until one morning at the end of the second form English class, all the students on one side of a table rose to leave before those on the other side.  

The result was much like what happens when one child suddenly steps off a teeter-totter: the weight of the still seated students tipped the table over.  Chaos ensued.  The girls screamed as they felt the table fall backwards, the boys yelling “Lie-la!”

It could have been worse.  Luckily, only a few bumps, scratches, and bruised egos—mine in particular—as both teacher and student learned this lesson of physics the hard way.  From that time forward, students were daily reminded to exit from the tables cautiously and simultaneously from both sides.

“Every puppy has his day, everybody has to pay, everybody has to meet his Waterloo.”  So many times Stonewall Jackson’s refrain echoed through my mind as my first Christmas away from home approached.  The tentacles of homesickness, lovesickness, the daily bouts of diarrhea—these began to suck away my spirit like humidity on a sweltering day.  Each evening as darkness fell on the mountainside I could hear the drums begin in the village.  Each morning as the sun rose over the plain to the east, the melting pot that was Waterloo begin bubbling with the distant cacophony of human life—an existence which, when I tried to reflect on it, was so radically different from my own as to be incomprehensible.  I was in Africa, but not of Africa.  I could not eat their food, drink their water or understand their Babel of tribal languages or survive under conditions they considered normal.  I had to have my daily anti-malaria pill and couldn’t even sleep at night outside the cocoon of a mosquito net.  

Yet as much as I resented the gulf created by this alienation, especially in my role as a teacher whose job was to help reshape Sierra Leone’s future, I realized one almost imperceptible change had occurred: somehow identities were beginning to emerge in my perceptions of the “scholars” in my charge.  Mohammed, Daniel, Josephine, Kadiatu, Samuel—these young people who, though cast in infinite shades, had been lumped under the misnomer “black,” and hence presumed indistinguishable, possessed a uniqueness as individuals.  Together we had struggled with daily lessons both in and outside the classroom.  I was beginning to know them better than the Volunteers I had trained with so closely.  The veil of their blackness had been drawn aside, and the same faces that had been lost in anonymity those first few weeks of school had been somehow transformed into myriad manifestations of that one entity which has no absolute stereotype—the personality of a fellow human being.

Chapter 6

In late November, the lab equipment arrived.  As was the case with the sea chest of my personal belongings, shipped from St. Louis even before we departed for Sierra Leone, so, too, the shipment of lab supplies and chemicals was weeks tardy in its arrival—this after the urgency pressed upon me to prepare the order.  And just as I had managed to get by with a single suitcase of belongings for nearly two months, in my role as Science Master I had to make do for all those months by drawing on my meager knowledge of chemistry and physics, and botany, the only college level science course I ever made an A in.  

Ignorant of West African flora, with only an ancient British biology text as a resource, I sketched generic diagrams of the sexual organs of flowers on the blackboard and had the scholars memorize the parts and their functions, which titillated them no end.  I struggled mightily to describe for them, in terms they could more readily understand, the mysteries of osmosis, capillary attraction, photosynthesis, metamorphosis.  

I began to enjoy the role of teacher as ham, using histrionics to focus their attention, feeding my growing pedagogical ego upon their laughter.  In my mind biology coalesced around two principal features: survival of the individual and survival of the species.  The first in service of the latter.  In what I originally thought was an inspired moment but no doubt appeared to any spectator as manic overplay, I spiced the climactic moment of the reproductive process in insects with spurious onomatopoeia. 

“Bang, bang, bang!” I exclaimed while dramatizing with my hands the insemination of the wanton virgin queen in a bee colony by several male drones.  I knew instantly I had struck comedic gold in my painful efforts to bridge the language and cultural gulf between science and the scholars.  They were rolling in the aisles, especially dutiful, gangly Hannah, who, up to this point, had always flaunted her Adventist piety and propriety, and was now trying to modestly suppress her laughter by covering her mouth with both hands.

The arrival of the lab supplies, however, proved more challenge than aid, a depreciation rather than validation of my esteemed role as the school’s science master.  It was another of my Waterloo moments.  Crate after crate of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid, probably enough to stock the lab storeroom for the next ten years, was unloaded from the two lorries, some of the dark brown glass bottles broken in shipment.  Prying open the crates containing other supplies, we found hiding within the cushioning excelsior fifty circular tins of magnesium ribbon, enough to stage an Independence Day extravaganza.  

What would I do with all of this stuff?  How could I hide or at least disguise my misguided attempts to stock a secondary school science lab?  I had never really had time to carefully review the one ancient chemistry text Clifford loaned me to ascertain what was needed over the course of a year or longer.   The lab grants were, as is the case with so many government handouts, a “use it or lose it” proposition, and the clock had already begun ticking even before I knew I had been accepted into the Peace Corps.  As a result, I largely plucked from my dim recollections of those futile semesters in high school and college chemistry and physics classes the images of experiments that had left bold impressions: the intense white light given off when magnesium is ignited (the reason for its use in fireworks and incendiary bombs) and the explosive qualities of hydrogen gas produced when adding hydrochloric or sulfuric acid to certain metals.  I had scanned the text and cross-checked with my memory for other useful lab items, keeping within the limits of the grants: an inexpensive microscope, a beam balance scale and a triple beam balance, a voltmeter, varieties of lab glassware—much of it arriving broken—twenty Bunsen burners, at Clifford’s insistence, and several feet of rubber tubing, all of which was useless until some unknown future date when gas would be piped into the lab.  Safe to say, neither the practical nor the pedagogical had played a major role in my determinations.  The effect was the thing.  What, in God’s name, did they expect from a Creative Writing major?  And under duress no less? 

The second problem lay in the efficacy of specific gravity when ordering chemicals.  When the order was sent in, which (another complication) was in metric quantities, I had no idea what specific gravity was or why it was listed beside each chemical.  Of course, as any science major or any student who has ever received a grade higher than C in chemistry knows, specific gravity is a substance’s density relative to water, hence the more common name, relative density.  Lead, for example, has a specific gravity of 11.35, whereas the specific gravity of magnesium is 1.74.  In terms of bulk, a pound of lead doesn’t amount to much, but a pound of magnesium ribbon is a lot of fireworks.  

Having sorted and successfully stored the supplies, it didn’t take long to divine that allowing the scholars to conduct experiments was largely impossible, not to mention foolhardy. The conditions at Peninsula were primitive—no electricity, no gas, no water, other than that hauled by buckets from the nearby stream when there was a stream.  Besides, letting the scholars experiment meant considerable cleanup.  Since I had at least the foresight to purchase half a dozen portable propane tanks, there was only one logical course of action: the science master would stage the experiments at the front table of the classroom for the benefit of the entire class.

So I built a small dais to elevate both myself and the teacher’s table.  In my first venture into this mode of hands-off science, I tried to keep the scholars involved by having them file up to the front table one at a time to view firsthand sample slides of yeast, amoeba, and paramecium. They were to draw the amoeba when they returned to their tables.  Some complained they couldn’t see anything; a few others bluffed and, when asked to draw what they saw, rendered a number of amusing fictions from their imaginations.  This, however, was a familiar problem, one I had already experienced as a botany lab assistant at the University of Missouri.  

We explored the periodic table displayed on a chart hung at the front of the lab.  Deadly, dull stuff.   They had little problem committing things like this to memory, but its significance remained a mystery.  We tested various liquids with litmus paper to determine their acidity or alkalinity.  I’m not sure which was lagging most: my interest or theirs.  But when I could stand it no longer, I departed from my necessarily random script and burned a long strip of magnesium ribbon.  It got their attention.   But then I lost it again testing the solubility of salts in water at varying temperatures.  I was discovering not only why I had so little aptitude for science, but also that the notion popular in the States that students in third world countries, particularly Africa, were starving for knowledge, any kind of knowledge, was as mythical as the notion that any young American plucked fresh from four years of college was qualified to teach third world students any subject under the sun.

Clifford had, since the end of the revival, deemed the Arts and Crafts room a more fitting place to hold the morning assemblies than the lawn in front of his office.  There was too much competition at the latter location: lorries coming and going at the intersection, the constant loud bickering and haggling at the roadside stands—it was difficult to keep the students’ attention and be heard above the raucous din.  The proverbial straw that prompted the move to the Arts and Crafts classroom occurred in early December.  Kande was leading the service one morning when a lorry from upcountry stopped at the intersection and disgorged its passengers.  One wizened little old lady hobbled over to the edge of Peninsula’s compound, calmly lifted her skirts and squatted to relieve herself.  Clifford became apoplectic in mid-hymn at this trespass, leaped from the raised sidewalk, flailing his arms at the intruder shouting “Shoo!  This is school property!  Get up!  Get out!  Shoo!”

The old woman’s eyes widened in terror as it began to dawn on her she was the object of this white man’s wrath.  At first, she stood her ground, her business evidently unfinished, but finally gathered up her skirts and fled wailing as the crazed white man, his red tie flapping over his shoulder, bore down upon her.   Her rocking, penguin-like retreat was greeted by a chorus of laughter from spectators at the intersection.  Clifford stopped at the edge of the ditch that ran alongside the highway and, arms akimbo, glared at the crowd.  Finally, he walked back up the hill shaking his head in frustration at the Sisyphean task of bringing order, piety, and education to West Africa. 

So no more assemblies outside the headmaster’s office.  It was the Friday before the first trimester ended, coinciding with the Christmas break.  Ron and I had celebrated the advent of our coming holiday with two six-packs of Star beer the night before.  Hung-over and absolutely unprepared, I stumbled into the prep and storage room of the lab and cast my eyes over the shelves of chemicals and equipment for the ingredients of a farewell gesture, an experiment that would whet the scholars’ appetites for more science when the break was over.  There was precious little time to prepare so I went with my own proclivity for something that would spark more excitement than litmus paper and periodic charts, something with an element of risk: a hydrogen gas generator!  That would be the thing.   

The illustration in the 1942 British text, which reminded me of the graphics in a TV ad—“Bufferin won’t upset your stomach as aspirin often does”—seemed simple enough: all I had to do was set up a flask, put a two-holed stopper in it, one hole to accommodate a thistle tube through which sulfuric acid would be added to zinc scraps in the flask, the other hole to hold a piece of glass tubing bent at a right angle and tapered on one end.  I can do this, I thought.  The hydrogen gas would bubble up, make its way through the glass tubing and I would ignite it to the awe of the scholars and the glory of science.  It certainly held the promise of more excitement than dipping strips of litmus paper in various solutions and holding them up for inspection.

I decided to skip the morning assembly to give myself time to set up the experiment.  The thistle tube slid easily into the first hole of the rubber stopper.  Now, all that remained was to prepare the tube where the gas would exit.  I fired up one of the propane burners and began heating the center of a length of glass tubing.  

Through the wall that separated the Arts and Crafts room from the storeroom of the science lab, I could hear the muted wave of one hundred and fifty bodies rising from their benches.  There was silence and then the voices lifted in song.  Images of certain students flashed into my mind, their faces suspended in the spell of the music:

“Lord in the morning thou shalt hear

Our prayers ascending nigh.

To thee do we . . .”

The experiment.   Focus.  The singing ended as I bent over to heat a six-inch-long piece of glass tubing in the roaring burner’s orange and blue tongue.  As I twirled the tubing between my thumbs and index fingers so it would be heated evenly, an orange glow illuminated the glass.  Suddenly, I felt heat in my fingers—too late!  A split-second impulse from my reptilian brain screamed at my fingers, release the damn tubing!  It dropped to the cement floor, shattering on impact.

Sucking on the stinging, reddened tips of my fingers and thumbs, I panicked at the thought this might not be as easy as I had assumed.  The second try, I protected my fingers with a rag and my handkerchief, but this only made rolling the tube impossibly difficult and the tubing simply melted on one side, collapsing upon itself.  The clock was not on my side: trial and error was eating up precious time.  The third try should have been charmed, but also had to be aborted: I had gone back to bare fingers using a longer piece of tubing so the heat would not radiate so quickly.  I experimented with not heating it so long, but as I tried to bend the tubing, it snapped.  Trial four, however, proved the world was still the locus of God’s miracles as the tubing finally arched into a slightly flattened but precise right angle. 

A stentorian solitary voice seeped through the block wall separating the room where I was working from the arts and crafts room.  It was Joseph, Mr. Koker’s obsequious protégé, the Uriah Heep of Peninsula, delivering the benediction: “Lord we beseech thee to soften the hearts of those hardened against thy will, to open the casements of these thy temples, to enter in that thy will be done . . .”

Pentecostal rhetorical gifts had descended upon Joseph.  More likely, Prep Master Koker had filched bits and pieces from some 18^th century source which he had prodded Joseph to memorize. 

“We pray thy blessing upon thy servants Dr. Clifford, Master Koker, and Master Kande and the other members of Peninsula’s staff, especially those who have crossed the ocean wide for the deliverance of these thy humble children . . .”  

Yeah, right.  I noted for future reference that Adventist members of staff were the only ones singled out by name for God’s attention, then returned to the task at hand.  Beneath the diagram of the generator the textbook gave advice for making a nozzle at one end of the tubing: “A nozzle can be made by heating the glass to its melting point, then pulling on both ends of the tubing—not too fast, nor too slow—as if pulling taffy.”  Protecting my fingers with rags again, I waited until the orange glow deepened and the tubing felt flexible, then I pulled.  Gravity, however, pulled faster.  A slender hair of glass, a drooping U, hung between the flat bend and the end of the tubing.  

Time was running out.  The scholars’ voices began to wail once more:  

“. . . doom comes at last!

‘Almost’ cannot avail,

‘Almost’ is but to fail.

Sad, sad that bitter wail,

‘Almost,’ but lost.”

My ears stung for they seemed to be singing about my futile efforts to assemble the chemistry experiment.  Evidently, the revival had not only put its stamp on where morning assembly was now held, but also on the music selection.  I knew this piece from my childhood, the old soul-tugging “hour of decision” at St. Johns Baptist Church.  I wondered what sense the scholars made of the words, or whether they, just as I had when younger, were riding the melodic wave of some unfulfilled longing.  

The nozzle would have to point down, the direction gravity had pulled it; there was no more time.  The instructions said, “Nick the tapered end of the tubing with a file and snap firmly.”  I did so and the elegant taper was now a jagged fang.  I cursed and flung it at the wall where it shattered into a hundred unforgiving pieces.  Panic.

The sound of the scholars filing out of the Arts and Crafts room drifted in through the storeroom window.  Lecturing myself to be calm, I made one last attempt.  This time the heated glass tubing bent perfectly on the first try.  I felt the thrill of a Renaissance artisan as I held up my handiwork admiring it for only a moment—curves, such beautiful things, cradles of the eye, the heart, the intellect. 

Scholars were entering the lab.  To hell with the nozzle taper.  The wider opening will simply produce a larger jet of flame, I reasoned, as I gathered up the materials and stepped into the lab.

Form II was certainly eager for “real science experiments.”  Ron had assembled a makeshift weather station for a geography unit the previous year: a plastic funnel in a large can became a rain gauge for any scholar equipped with a ruler.  During the September rains it perpetually overflowed, a fact that registered indifferently in their minds since geography wasn’t accorded the stature of science.  Science was . . . well, science was the antithesis of black magic.  Not because it wasn’t magical in their thinking, but because to them it was the white man’s purview, i.e., white magic.

Today would be a revelation of this marvelous gift, sciencecraft (as opposed to witchcraft), a glorious milestone in the evolution of Peninsula Secondary School.  There was no need to scold for attention this morning.  Even Joseph, who alone seemed to hold science in modest contempt, stayed awake as I wasted five minutes trying to ease the nozzle for the gas’s exit into the rubber stopper without breaking it.  At last the apparatus seemed ready and I dropped a few zinc scraps into the flask, inserted the stopper, and began pouring the fuming acid down the delicate throat of the thistle tube.

“Yes, Joseph, the thistle tube does, in fact, resemble my drawings of the female sex organ of a flower—upside down, of course.”  A ripple of giggles swelled through the otherwise hushed lab.

The acid began bubbling as it interacted with the zinc, wisps of vapor floating up from the surface of the acid in the Erlenmeyer flask.

“You see how the gas is being liberated?” I intoned, giddy in my role as high priest of science. “What kind of gas?”

“Hydrogen gas,” they chanted in unison.  I held the flask aloft so they might see it better recalling, as I did, the sacrilege at the beginning of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Introibo ad altare Dei.”  It was the beginning of the Catholic mass, “I will go up to God’s altar.” 

I set the flask gingerly on the demonstration table.  My hands shook as I fumbled with a match and tried to hold it before the untapered muzzle of the delivery tube.  Nothing.   No gas flame, no brief pop, nada.  The light of science was plunged into darkness.  Someone tell Sir Francis Bacon—I came and nothing happened, only this and nothing more.

“Of course nothing happens,” I reasoned out loud.  “The air inside the flask must be driven out first before the hydrogen can escape.”  Their eyes were riveted on me, caught in the thrall of science.  “The hydrogen gas is still being liberated,” and I held the flask aloft again for another view of the vapors inside the flask.

Fake for more time.  Invoke the catechism of science.  “Do you understand pressure?”

“Yes,” they chanted in unison.

“Joseph, what is pressure?”

“Pressure is the force acting upon a unit per surface of area,” he replied.  Memorization without understanding equals gobbledygook.  But my acolytes deserved encouragement.

“That’s close, Joseph.”

“Kadiatu, what is pressure?”

“Pressure is the force acting upon a surface per unit of area.”

“Well done, Kadiatu!” I enthused.  

“Alright, now which tube will the pressure push the air out—this tube, or this tube?”

Their expressions were blank, though I saw the fever of gambling in some eyes.  I pointed to the thistle tube.  “What is this tube called?”

Puzzled expressions.  

“Mohammed?”

“A th . . . thizzle?”  

“Thizzle?”  More giggles as the rest of the class caught the disparaging tone of my inflection.  Even the smartest boy in Form II could have a Waterloo moment.

“No, a thistle—T-H-I-S-T-L-E—tube.  Spell it class.”

“T-H-I-S-T-L-E,” they intoned.

“And this is the ‘delivery tube,’ where the hydrogen gas will come out,” I said pointing emphatically.  “Say it.”

“DE-LIVE-RY TUBE!”

“Now where will the hydrogen gas push the air out of the flask?  Right!  And where does the hydrogen gas come from?”

The Science Master figured he had probably screwed around long enough for the hydrogen gas to have expelled all the air.  It was time to try again to light the escaping gas.  Master fumbled with another match.  It went out before getting halfway to the mouth of the delivery tube.  As I thrust the second match at the tube, it smoked as though it had gone out again, then flared for only an instant.

BLAAMMMM!  The concussion and noise of the blast was amplified by the concrete block walls of the lab.  My ears rang like a tuning fork.  Yells of surprise and terror filled the room as the stopper and its female sex organ rocketed up between the rafters of the ceilingless room, slammed into the metal roof and rained glass fragments on the scholars below.  Stunned, the Science Master and high priest glanced at the hand that had held the match to the tube, marveled that it was not a bleeding stump, marveled for only a nanosecond that the flask containing the acid and zinc fragments rested intact on the demonstration table, still holding its fizzing contents.  Marveled that by some improbable stroke of luck he had not been blinded and/or scalded by spattering acid.  

For some uncomprehendable reason I would go on living, unscathed and only slightly chastened.  My face burned, partly from the singeing heat of the blast and partly from an acute case of embarrassment mingled with shock.  My dramaturgical instincts took over—the show must go on.  I tried to speak to the cowering congregation as they began to emerge from under the lab tables but could barely articulate any words in the ringing bell jar that enveloped my head.

“So you see, hydrogen is a very explosive gas when it is mixed with air.  That is why experiments like these are not done by scholars until they learn the dangers involved.”

Hypocrite, heal thyself, I thought, as my poor frightened flock stared up at me, skepticism writ large in their faces.  “Yes,” I said to Joseph’s question.  “You may go ahead and brush the pieces of glass off your table.”

* * * *

Tears were streaming down Ms. Conte’s cheeks as I embellished the story of my hydrogen experiment from the backseat of the Jeep.  She had been teaching Home Economics in the Arts and Crafts room when the explosion occurred.  Ron and I were giving her a lift to Freetown and, since we had left Waterloo later than usual, Ron was driving like a madcap, which served to pitch her laughter closer to hysteria than usual.  I wanted badly to sustain that mood; I wanted to be its author, the fountainhead of that levity so I could continue sipping the sweet champagne of her bubbly laughter.  But I had exhausted my single funny story for the day and as I ransacked my mind for another, it seemed, at this moment, there were no more incidents of my life worth reciting.  

As we raced across the narrow, one-way bridge just before Hastings, two old women with heaped bundles of laundry balanced on their heads, returning from the stream underneath the bridge, scuttled to the safety of the roadside, their eyes glinting fear like cornered prey, their laundry scattering on the red clay as the Jeep sped past.  Ms. Conte’s laughter pealed above their dismay and the roar of the Jeep’s engine.

I glanced at the passing phantasm of Hastings as we sped through it: several jerrybuilt homes made from oil drums flattened into steel panels alongside unfinished skeletons of mud and sticks.  Hastings was close kin to Waterloo, two unsubstantial, decaying Colony villages, Krio outposts, decaying molars in the bite of independence.   Hastings being closer to Freetown, however, lived in the age of electricity, that symbol of post-independence progress which had not yet made its way to Waterloo.  

On Sunday evenings, when Ron and I sped back to Waterloo in the darkness, I wondered at the secret lives that played out in rooms close to the highway lit by a single, dangling, naked bulb.  In many ways I preferred the other Africa: shuttered windows, flickering bush lamps, the invisible presence of black bodies against the moonless backdrop of night.  Was it this kind of darkness that had for centuries sustained the common denominator of cathedral and tavern: a dimness that did not illuminate life’s unanswered questions, but only magnified its mysteries?

Now, sitting in the back seat of the Jeep, I watched the inscrutable pages of Africa’s story flash by, my mind drowsing in the numbing largo of the dry season’s perpetually clear skies.  For the first time it dawned on me—the roadside of Sierra Leone in 1962 did not hawk its cultural wares as was the case back in the States where billboards touted our addictive obsessions, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent,” “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” drumming hypnotically brand names like Burma Shave, or beckoning one to the romance and adventure of the open road: “See the USA, in your Chevrolet.”  There was no litter, only long unbroken stretches of red soil and green flora baked into submission by the sun.

My attention drifted back again to Ron and Ms. Conte’s heads, the green mole of jealousy, blind yet insistent, burrowing from brain to chest.  Her laughter at something he said bobbed like ripe fruit above the surface of my longing.  I watched as she leaned sideways, convulsed in a fit of laugher, the cornrows of her hair lightly touching Ron’s shoulder—that amazing grace note of a woman’s prerogative to flirt.  

I had never in my life been attracted to a black woman, but suddenly I ached to grab her from behind, kiss that long delicious neck.  But the hands that had been saved from the exploding generator were as useless as those of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock.  In this monotonous limbo of the living, the hydrogen generator had exploded like a tinkling cymbal.  I could have lost my hands and eyes.  They had been saved—the sheer marvel of it!  Yet could I, on a moment’s impulse, make advances to this being, this tantalizing fruit dangled before me?  Never.  Light years separated thought and action.  Hapless sensorium that I was, I hesitated and ached, ached and hesitated, a pendulum swinging between desire and despair.  

And what would it be like, the preamble to loving this woman sitting no more than three feet in front of me whom I barely knew?  That image from my high school years flashed into my mind: standing before coach, the momentary hesitation before answering his question, “The kid you’ll be wrestling is colored.  Is that a problem?”   

Colored?  My imagination tried to grapple with the thought of this brave new world of intimacy.  Still a virgin at twenty-one , I had been raised in a puritanical atmosphere that labeled even innocuous pastimes like dancing and playing cards on Sunday as way stations on the slippery slope to hell.  I really had little idea what sexual intimacy with a woman entailed, white or black.  A couple of guys I shared a table with in high school Physics class had joked about putting a bag over the head of a girl considered unattractive in our class.  The efficacy of this solution was lost on me, for the images I had conjured of intimacy with the opposite sex had never progressed beyond the act of “necking.”  Putting a bag over Ms. Conte’s head would hide the one thing that beckoned most—the allure of her beautiful face, the source of that infectious laughter.  

At that moment the Jeep hit a dip in the pavement and Ms. Conte’s laughter rose again in concert with my stomach.

Before we had left Waterloo, we stopped at the post office to pick up our mail.  As the sights alongside the highway became depressingly familiar, I withdrew from my shirt pocket the tissue-like aerogramme addressed to me.  I had recognized the familiar handwriting as the clerk slid the blue letter across the counter.  My mind tried to grasp the fact of my mother dropping this same blue paper into a random and incomprehensibly distant mailbox where it began its journey and somehow, two weeks later, reached the spatial coordinates printed beneath my name.

I was reluctant to read the letter as the Jeep bounced and jerked along the tarmac toward Freetown, especially in the presence of Ron and Ms. Conte, but they were obviously preoccupied with each other.  The letter, even though its contents could be guessed—the winter weather report from St. Louis, the declining state of my father’s health, the health and passing of Mom’s acquaintances who had been death to me since I was five years old—might just distract me from my funk.  So often, it seemed to me, two people as close as a mother and son ought to take time to sit down and chart all of the choices they have made in the previous ten years of their lives, if for no other reason than to illuminate the gulf that separates them.

Still I paused, considering the increased sense of homesickness this small, blue, carefully folded paper might summon: the delicate pinched face at the airport boarding gate, the eyes brimming with tears as I turned toward my future and she clung perilously to our shared past.  So much giving in that face, as if, having abided the selfishness of the two men in her life for so many years, her existence was merely a fragile shell, gutted of some undefined promise it once held.  

I had first become cognizant of that fragility when at age nine I had made the trip down the aisle of St. John’s Baptist Church as the congregation sang “Almost Persuaded.”  At the end of the line of people who filed up to congratulate me after the service had concluded was that delicate, troubled face whose reddened, tear-filled eyes failed to see the irony in my decision to accept her savior: this longed for triumph would ultimately become her loss.

Our dear Stephen,

How is Africa?  Quite different than what you imagined or what I now imagine?  Have you seen any of the wildlife Africa is so famous for: monkeys or elephants, or perhaps a lion or leopard?  I hope there are no snakes.

And how is the weather?  Very hot, I imagine.  It has been very cold and very wet here, and your father is down with another bout of pneumonia.  Do you remember Mr. Politsi, your junior high band teacher?  He was attacked by a band of young colored kids while waiting for the bus two weeks ago.  They beat him very badly, and he is not expected to recover.  I don’t know what gets into young people nowadays, especially young Negroes.  It just seems like they want to destroy everything we’ve built up.  I certainly hope they aren’t like that in Africa.

What are the children like whom you teach?  I’m sure they are very eager to learn.  I sometimes think we Americans have become so spoiled and take so much for granted.  Just last week vandals broke into Ritenour High.  They stopped up the drains on the second-floor lavatories and then left the water running.  No one knew till the police while making their rounds spotted the water running like a waterfall down the front steps of the school.  The damage was estimated at $80,000.  It was two boys who said they were bored, tired of going to school.  I just can’t understand that.  I always liked school so much and I am so proud you are a teacher and even more proud that you are making this sacrifice to help those less privileged than we Americans.

Do all the children speak English?  Do you find it difficult to teach colored children?  Are there any white students in your school?  I received your telegram when you arrived, but so far no letters.  I know you are very busy, but your mother can’t help worrying and would like to know you are all right.

“A letter from your Krio-titi back home?”  Ms. Conte had turned her head toward me over the front seat; she was smiling.

“Krio-titi?” 

“Your girlfriend,” Ron interpreted.  “You know, whoever it was you were banging back home.”

“It’s a letter from my mom,” I replied sheepishly.

“I think maybe Stephen’s a virgin,” Ron said in confidential tones to Ms. Conte.

“What do you mean?” she asked, pouting.  “He is not a woman.”

“Well he’s been here four months and I don’t believe he’s fucked anybody.”

A terrible scowl furrowed Ms. Conte’s face.  She drew back from Ron, sidling as close to the passenger door as possible.  “Eh!  You talk like a bushman,” she said in deeply offended tones, her eyes fixed icily on the road ahead, “in the presence of a lady!”

Ron laughed.  “Pardonner, mademoiselle.”

“Do you pardon the rotting fruit of the gutter?” she spat back.

I couldn’t suppress the smile that wanted to be released to my lips.  This I could enjoy.

“Aw, knock it off,” Ron said disgustedly.  “What the hell is it to you anyway?”

“I will not ride in this . . . this Landrover!”  She began yanking at the door handle.

The Jeep’s wheels screeched and I was catapulted across the back of the front seat, instinctively grabbing Ms. Conte’s shoulders as she shot toward the windshield.  Still, she hit the visor rather hard.  For only a split second I felt tenderness, an unexpected intimacy, her subtle perfumed scent filling my nose and throat.  Then we both rebounded into our seats.

Unruffled, she pulled the door handle, swung open the door, and stepped purposefully down to the pavement.  Even so close to Freetown, the roadside was still desolate, overgrown with bush.  Yet she managed a stately grace as she walked ahead of the Jeep, never pausing to look back.

Ron glared after the retreating figure for a moment, then shifted into first gear and stomped on the accelerator, causing the Jeep’s rear tires to scream again.  The passenger door slammed shut from the force of the acceleration.

“Ron, for Christ’s sake,” I pleaded, watching the shrinking, solitary figure out the rear window.  “You can’t just leave her there!”

“Why the hell not?  Not to worry; she’ll wiggle her ass at some passing lorry driver and get a ride.  I’m sick and tired of her Queen Mother act.  Do her a favor . . . give her a ride, and what do you get for thanks?  Her problem is she thinks her shit don’t stink.”

“Well, what the hell’s your problem?”

The Jeep ground to a halt once more.  Ron turned abruptly to face me with a look that said I was about to get decked.  “You want to pick her up?  Fine, go ahead.”  He had his hand on the door handle.  “I’ll do the walking.”

“I just want to know why you can’t swallow a little of that stubborn pride for once,” I said.

“History, man . . . history . . . and because my pride happens to be more valuable than that bitch’s mood swings.  When and if I swallow it, it won’t be for a lousy lay like her.”

Why, in that moment, the possible innuendo contained in Ron’s response failed to register in my thinking, I’m unable to say.  Even later, I simply chalked the whole episode up to one more sign that irritability was rampant during the dry season.  They were right, whoever “they” were: as the dry season progressed, irritability flourished, tempers flared, time seemed frozen in the sun’s amber light.  My primary focus was simply maybe, just maybe, with this sudden rift between Ron and Ms. Conte, my fantasy of getting to first, perhaps even second base with her held more promise—providing I somehow discovered the nerve to make my desires known.




                                     Chapter 7

The Sierra Leone of our contemporary consciousness—infamous for diamond smuggling and the rapacious savagery of a “civil war”—this was not the Sierra Leone I believed I had come to in 1962.  For me, located where I was at the edge of the Colony mountains and within an hour’s time from world-class beaches on the Atlantic, it held all the charm and, more, the unrelenting monotony of a South Sea island.  It was the land of palm wine, hammocks, malaria, and bureaucratic ineptitude—a kind of shuffling, swaying, sensual dance toeing the tightrope of survival.  The only violence that assaulted my senses in those first few months was the appalling poverty and in-your-face presence of disfiguring and debilitating diseases—elephantiasis, yaws, ascites, kawashiokor, even leprosy—afflictions not hidden from sight in hospitals or clinics, those institutions of convalescence that keep pain and suffering hidden from American eyes.  

There was an undersized, precocious boy in my first form English class, delicate of feature, so irresistibly cute your heart melted as he hobbled from the classroom at the end of the period on a leg swollen to the size of a tree trunk by elephantiasis.  And, yet, Kei’s disarming smile is what I remember most, those perfect white teeth gleaming, an uncomprehendable felicity, a charmed mystery that defied understanding.

But all of this was not what crowded my mind on the Sunday before Christmas, December 23^rd.  Ron had left on one of his upcountry safaris.  He and three other Volunteers had gone hiking in the Tingi Hills in the Kono district near the eastern border of Sierra Leone, the area of the diamond fields.  A permit was required to enter.  Ron and his hiking buddies had no permit, but planned to avoid police checkpoints by taking certain back roads he had been vaguely advised of.   

Like Ron, Samuel, too, had deserted our mountain at the edge of Waterloo, gone to visit his mother in Bo.  The hot afternoon sun and the Harmattan haze held life’s rhythms in breathless suspension as I sat on the top step of the front porch nursing a glass of lemon-line squash.  I had taken a break from the project that lay before me, trying to figure out how I would manage to pass the next week alone, with no wheels and nowhere to go even if I had them.  Ron and I usually shared the duty of preparing meals on a weekly basis, but now I had no one to even cook for.  

A concealed band of chimpanzees, chattering and screaming in the ironwood trees below our bungalow, startled me.  The locals called chimps “babu,” probably a corruption of baboon though the chimpanzee is a small ape whereas the baboon is a reclusive and often feared member of the monkey family.  Samuel had recently brought us some mangoes he had picked from the forest, so I supposed the chimps were poaching our ripening mango crop.  I hated to disabuse my mother’s fantasies about West African wildlife but, so far, chimpanzees were nearly the extent of my encounters.  No lions, elephants, hippos, gorillas. But knowing how powerful the chimps were and how easily they became agitated, I had no intentions of playing Jane Goodall to study them more closely.  

Only one other wild creature had claimed my attention after five months in Africa: a snake which had a burrow somewhere under the bungalow’s foundation.  One day, when Ron and were returning from school for lunch, I saw a black whip-like shape gliding along the floor of the garage next to the wall near the open door.  Ron stopped the Jeep abruptly when I yelled “snake” and I swung down from the passenger side to inspect the critter.  Instantly its body rose up in the menacing posture of a cobra prepared to strike.  I backed away a couple of steps, more cautious, scanning the interior of the garage for shovel or hoe, anything that would serve as a weapon.

“Watch out!  That may be a spitting cobra,” Ron yelled.  “Their venom can blind you.”

  In that instant the sun’s rays caught an arc of juice flying in my direction.  I jumped back and ran to get the European broom that Samuel never used from the kitchen.  By the time I returned, the cobra had disappeared into a hole at the back of the garage.   

Yet this kind of excitement was rare though it made me doubly wary whenever I entered the garage or even our bedroom at night.  Geckoes were the major form of wildlife I encountered on a daily basis. I would watch them while I graded papers as they bagged their fill of insects on our living room walls.  It had to be the numbing monotony of the dry season, I thought, that explained why so many European expatriates in Africa before the advent of satellite communications—excepting the case of most missionaries—turned to drink to silence the incessant ticking of the remaining minutes, hours, and days of their exile.  A tour of duty in Africa in those days could become a sentence to the prison of self which, unhappily, many could not abide.

Increasingly, I felt the need to do something physical—abandon the ungraded exercise books on the desk in the living room.  I loved hiking the mountain behind the old District Commissioner’s residence where the Cliffords now lived, but my overactive imagination pictured encounters with other cobras, perhaps a green mamba dangling from a tree limb, planting a deadly kiss on the top of my head as I passed underneath.  The baboons and wild pigs, which I had heard stories of but had yet to encounter, also propagated in my imagination, swaddling my desire to explore in a cocoon of timidity.

I resisted the idea of walking down into Waterloo.  Walking is a spectator sport.  I sensed that a walk through the town would reverse the roles of who was watching whom.  I would become the object of overt curiosity, the creature caged in his white flesh and his American identity.

I had come to discover the merit of Ron’s suggestion that Waterloo be razed by bulldozers as we did slums and old buildings in America. A fresh beginning was needed.  It had few attractions to draw the average person, even a curious Peace Corps Volunteer.  The couple of bone-jarring trips made in the Jeep down its pocked and rutted lanes had filed a cursory inventory in my brain: one elementary school, two churches (one Adventist and the other Catholic), a pock-marked soccer field, a clinic by the highway, a post office which doubled as a train station, and an outdoor market which, even by Sierra Leone standards, was distinguished in my mind as merely an attraction to flies.    

Status in the town was measured by one’s roof: the few with corrugated steel and those without.   A handful of solidly built bungalows, belonging to Waterloo’s half dozen movers and shakers—like Peninsula’s African faculty, Messrs. Koker, Kande, and Sesay—lined a single rutted street.  To the casual observer there was no visible commercial base for the town’s existence, not even nearby fields that upcountry villages subsisted on.  Most glaringly absent was the close sense of community that bound together the tribal villages.  Amazingly, however, the Krios of Waterloo referred condescendingly to their fellow upcountry citizens as “bushmen.”

Peninsula Secondary School, despite its woeful budget and struggle to become a full-fledged secondary school, stood apart from the village, a symbol of its pretensions if not its ambitions.  The block walls and corrugated roofs symbolized the kind of permanence Waterloo sorely lacked.  The fact that the former D.C.’s mountainside mansion was now occupied by the school’s headmaster and his family was a symbol not lost on Waterloo’s inhabitants.

Determined not to let my exile and isolation drive me to drink, I had begun leveling a portion of the hillside at the front of our bungalow for a badminton court.  Due to the hill’s steepness, I had to dig down about four feet on the court side nearest the house.  It was hot, backbreaking, blister blooming work and I stripped down to my khaki shorts, wielding a pick I had borrowed from the Cliffords against the red, rocky soil.  My labor on this project had become a spectacle for the village women who traipsed up the forest path to gather firewood.  Later in the day, with cumbersome loads of wood balanced delicately on their heads, the ladies glided back down the path to Waterloo, giggling as they passed the bungalow, their musical banter floating up the hillside like fragmented melodies as they disappeared from sight.  What was so funny, I wondered?  The sight of a half-naked white man or the sight of a white man doing physical labor? 

“How’s the project coming?”  Clifford’s voice startled me from my thoughts.  It was the first time I had seen him in shorts, exposing his spindly, pasty-white legs to the world.  Did local women also giggle at this spectacle?

“Okay, I guess . . . a little more work than I had imagined.”

Malcolm was grinning his customary Cheshire grin as he turned back from surveying the shameful progress of the excavation.  I feared he might say something about my defacing the hillside.  After all, both his residence and our bungalow were on loan from the Sierra Leone Department of Education.

“I’d have come to lend you a hand, but Frida keeps me busy with honey-do’s.”

“It’s okay . . . keeps me out of trouble.  With a little luck I might finish it before the end of my two-year term.”

“Kind of lonely here this weekend.  I heard Ron was leaving.  Samuel gone too?”

“Yep, just me. and the dog.”  A mangy pye-dog had adopted us.  He kept me awake nights barking at spectral threats in his doggy imagination.  But this unfortunate critter refused to be chased off, apparently sensing that the search for a home in Waterloo might be an excursion ending in a pot where he would be boiled for “chop.”

“Frida and I were wondering if you would like to join us for Christmas dinner on Tuesday?”

“Well . . . sure.  Why not?”  I tried to imagine the Christmas feast vegetarians would prepare.  But it was an opportunity to observe the one special day that I had always celebrated with family since a child.  I certainly didn’t relish the idea of cooking a Christmas feast and eating it alone.

Another troop of half a dozen ladies and young girls was filing up the mountain trail, their voices loud, a note of mischief in their exchanges.  As expected, they began giggling as they saw us.  They picked up their ragged pace, laughing gaily as they jostled and shoved one another along the trail.

“Welcome to the sideshow,” I said to Malcolm.  “What do you think they find so funny?”

“Hard to say what goes on in their heads.  Seems a bit like flirting, wouldn’t you say?” He paused as he watched the retreating forms.  “I sometimes think . . . no, I have to say it’s become clear: African women are simply more promiscuous than their white counterparts.  They don’t appear to have our inhibitions . . . in matters of decency, I mean.  I have to constantly remind Koker and Kande to tell the school girls not to take off their blouses when they are sent to cut brush on the school compound . . . for punishment.  Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

There was a distant look in his eyes.  I tried to imagine the narratives unfolding inside his head as that inscrutable smile warped his face again.

“So we can expect you for Christmas dinner, say four o’clock?”

“I’ll be there.”  

He made as if to turn and go, his errand finished.  Inexplicably, I found myself starved for conversation with this man, craving a moment more of companionship, however brief or tedious.

“Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you since you’re a history major.  Nobody I’ve talked to seems to know how Waterloo got its name.  I mean, how did an African village come to be named after the place where Napoleon had his comeuppance?”

Gratified by my curiosity, the hollow distance in his eyes disappeared, replaced by a flickering flame of interest.  

“I’m afraid it’s part of the sad, ironic tale of European imperialism, much of it played out through a curious mixture of good intentions and political posturing.  The blame for most of it can be laid at the door of my own country.  You’re aware, of course, of how Sierra Leone got its name, aren’t you?”

I nodded.  “We were told in our training that it was first coined by a Portuguese explorer due to the shape of the cluster of mountains on the south side of Freetown harbor.”

“Ah, yes, Pedro da Centra.  But, actually, ‘Sierra Leone’ is Italian.  Its original Portuguese name, Serra de Leão, means lion mountains.  Once it was thought that lions actually roamed these mountains. Other anecdotal evidence stubbornly maintains it was the echoing roar of thunder in the mountains during the rainy season, not the shape, which gave rise to its original name.”

“Makes sense” I said.

“The harbor at Freetown was the original colonial prize.  It’s the world’s 3^rd largest natural harbor.  When the Sierra Leone Company formed the city of Freetown in 1792, it became the destination of repatriated Africans who were living in London.    After William Wilberforce finally persuaded the British Parliament to condemn trafficking in slaves, Freetown also became a drop-off for freed Africans from the Americas and those seized from slave ships.” 

“Could that have been the origin of the American solution for its freed slaves—ship them back to Africa?”  

“Interesting question.  I served in Liberia where those American blacks ended up.  But I’m not certain about how the dates coincide.  I do know depositing ex-slaves in this part of Africa became the fashion in the early 19^th century.”

I wanted to ask him if was true Freetown was also the dumping ground for deported London whores.  We had been told in our sketchy history lessons about West Africa that these white ladies explained the light complexion and distinct facial features of the Krio as well as the spread of venereal disease, but I feared the question might cause offense.

“In 1808 Freetown, and the mountainous peninsula surrounding it, became a British Crown Colony.  The rest of the Sierra Leone was not part of this colony.  However, it became a British Protectorate in 1896—14 tribes with distinct languages and customs were suddenly under the dominance of Freetown and its Krio politicians.”

“But what about Waterloo?”

“Ah yes, Waterloo.  It was never an indigenous village.  Soldiers of two West India regiments who had fought for the English at the Battle of Waterloo were resettled here after the war.  It became the furthest outpost of Colonial and Krio rule.” 

So this was part of the checkered role of Europeans in West African geography and politics.  It was a history I supposed had been repeated many times in many places as the seafaring powers of Europe brought their hegemony to the far corners of the earth.

“Say, I’d best be off.  Frida will fear the chimps kidnapped me or some other calamity. Tuesday, then . . . did I say four o’clock?”

I nodded and then watched as he rounded the corner of the house, the pale, erect figure marching to some inner drum whose beat I would probably never fathom, let alone hear.  Loneliness made the single status of most Peace Corps Volunteers and British VSO’s daunting enough, but the thought of bringing the woman you loved and starting a family in the “white man’s grave” was beyond my comprehension.  Where would Gavin go to school?  Were they planning more kids?  

I tried to imagine Clifford preaching to a congregation dressed in their Sabbath best at Waterloo Adventist Church each Saturday morning.  What went through his mind as he surveyed the two dozen or so passive, sweating faces, their hands moving in listless rhythms as they fanned themselves, trying vainly to stir motion into the oppressive mid-morning air as he tried to stir their imaginations with the message of Christianity?

I was slowly discovering the challenge of the Peace Corps mission to Sierra Leone was not ignorance insomuch as indifference, especially in the adults.  My charges in the classroom, for the most part, had a respectful eagerness about, if not understanding of, the role education might play in their advancement toward that Golden Fleece we call progress.  But the adults, though having claimed their independence, were highly resistant to change, battening their fortunes to a curious mixture of tribalism and English monarchial traditions.  It was as if the tropical heat and centuries’ old struggle to subsist had robbed them of all energy and initiative.  The road to the future followed in ruts laid down by the passage of imperialism.  

We had been vaguely informed of Sierra Leone’s passivity in our training back in the States, but it came across as a virtue, not a vice.  We were assured we would not be subjected to the more radical elements of progressivism that festered in Ghana and to a lesser degree Nigeria.  Sierra Leone was merely a backwater of inept politicians, bad roads, anopheles malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and a single narrow-gauge railway that ran from Freetown to Bo, the former capital of the Protectorate, notorious for its breakdowns and unpredictable schedule which were celebrated in a Krio song—“the train fo Bo, ee no wan gree fo go.”  

My friend Nolan in Freetown kept me apprised that things were not going particularly well for the group of Volunteers we had trained with.  Each of us had been so excited to learn that we were among the chosen ones at the end of our training: we were bound for the adventure in West Africa.  Now, there were rumors the dropout rate over the first four months of our tour in Sierra Leone was the 2^nd highest of any group currently placed by the Peace Corps.  The Philippines held first place for this dubious distinction.  When I did visit Freetown, the gossip among the Volunteers was about either who had been sent or who had elected to return to the States.  

Another topic of conversation was the woeful inadequacy of our Peace Corps training and the selection process.  We were given a refresher course in American History, a sketchy history and geography of Africa in general, though little in particular about Sierra Leone or even West Africa.  We endured a language course conducted primarily by two male college students from Sierra Leone who, though affable and patient with our struggles to master glottal stops, had little inkling of how to conduct a foreign language course.  Their instruction consisted of grilling us daily in the correct pronunciation of basic introductory phrases in Mende and Temne.  We quickly learned, upon our arrival in Sierra Leone, that in-depth training in Krio would have benefited us most, for it was the de facto lingua franca of Sierra Leone, not English, as had been advertised.  

Then there was the ludicrous physical training and, later in camp, the repelling, running, jumping jacks and pushups at dawn as if we were military recruits, not teacher trainees.  Adding injury to insult, one older recruit suffered a hernia from this ill-advised attempt to maintain the PR image of the Peace Corps.  I felt the thing each group member prized most about our “training” was the growing sense of camaraderie among the members, but this had been in many cases largely eviscerated as we were scattered to the four points of the compass in our Sierra Leone assignments.  

The person excoriated most for our failures, perhaps unfairly so, was the New York City shrink, a slender, mousey fellow whose opinion about who would be selected and who would remain in the States was weighted most heavily.  The fear of being sent home haunted all of us as we approached the end of our training.  However, it became clear to many of us who made the cut and realized our dream of going to West Africa that this fellow’s previous practice had never prepared him to truly anticipate or even imagine what an unseasoned group of young recruits was about to experience.

All of this was running through my mind as I prepared for my first Christmas thousands of miles from home, my first without the American mythology of Santa, sleigh bells, snow white landscapes, mistletoe, pine trees, and conspicuous consumption.  I would have to make do with whatever the Cliffords had to offer.  I wasn’t homesick exactly and felt no strong compulsion to leave either Waterloo or Sierra Leone, this place whose daily rhythms were gradually becoming my own.  I had even come to relish weekends alone as a time to play house, to naively though futilely exercise my sense of independence and self-reliance.  I tried earnestly to discipline myself to keep abreast of the grading and expand the horizons of my knowledge.  There was much time to read from that trunk load of books provided by the Peace Corps.  But the prospect of spending Christmas day alone, reading a book, had as much appeal and perhaps efficacy as counting sheep to fend off a sleepless night.                




                                    Chapter 8

“Kusheh, Mr. Livingston,” a voice, nearly a whisper, said from somewhere behind me.

A hair-raising rush brought my body to high alert, and the paperback I was reading fell to the floor.   Visitors were forever materializing from nowhere at our bungalow.

Craning my neck, I saw Kadiatu leaning against the arch at the entrance to the living room.

“Kusheh, Kadiatu.”  I retrieved the book hoping to disguise my lost composure.  “Aw di bohdi?”

“Di  bohdi wehl-o . . . tehnki,” she replied shyly.  “Mr. Clifford, he say to tell you dinner is almost ready.”

Kadiatu was one of the three students the Cliffords employed to help with household chores.  Santigie and Omaru, the other two, had left for their homes upcountry during the Christmas break.  Bashful in the presence of teachers, especially “Europeans,” Kadiatu had a bit of the tomboy in her, a robustness that seemed to contradict the bashfulness constantly on display.  At school this trait often put her in the company of boys.  

“Gosh . . . sorry.  I forgot the time . . . reading . . . this book.”  I held it up as verification.  She was a little confused, perhaps embarrassed because I was directing my apology to her.

Kadiatu had remained largely under my radar at school.  I knew she stayed with the Cliffords and rode with Malcolm in his Vauxhall to school.  On those occasions, when Malcolm’s duties as headmaster required staying late in his office, I had seen her bounding barefoot up our hill after school in the company of Santigie and Omaru, balancing a satchel of books and papers on her head, clutching a sandal in each hand.   

There were young ladies at Peninsula, some of them sixteen or seventeen years old, whose beauty or bearing caught my attention immediately.  Not Kadiatu.  She was, in the Krio vernacular, “Tani”—generally perceived as a small nice girl—though, I might add, endowed with generous breasts which her uniform shirt struggled to restrain.  Lodged at the periphery of my awareness primarily because she was one of Clifford’s protégés, she was a student in my Form II, stream B English class.  What struck me as odd was the fact that even though she fell under the loco parentis of the Cliffords, she was shabbily dressed each day in the same threadbare white shirt and companion gray skirt secured by a conspicuously large safety pin.  She remained largely inscrutable, often indifferent, because of what appeared to be a terminal case of bashfulness, a sensitivity she wore on her sleeve in the classroom, and I wondered if the broken front tooth revealed when she laughed or smiled might be partly the cause.  Amazingly, most of the scholars in my care had beautiful white teeth.  When in Freetown I marveled that the signature red-white boxes of Colgate toothpaste seemed to be a staple of every sidewalk retailer.

As we walked up the winding drive, she clung to her stoic silence, but to no avail, for her eyes betrayed a glint of barely restrained mischief.  The bouncy girlish step of the schoolgirl had vanished, replaced by the carriage of a young woman who seemed to glide over the stones and ruts in the driveway. 

“So what have you been doing during the Holidays?” I asked.  “I thought you would probably have gone home like Santigie and Omaru.”

“No sir.  Mrs. Clifford is wanting me to be helping in the house.”

“Where is home?”

“My mother lives in Freetown.”

“You must be breaking the heart of some Freetown boy staying here with the Cliffords.”

The remark provoked that bashful display of innocence and coyness, triggering the reflex to cover her mouth with her hand and turn her head away.

“Eh, Mr. Livingston . . . I am not having a boyfriend.”

It hadn’t taken me long to discover that my Krio, however impoverished, endeared me to the scholars.  “Eh, yu de lai tumohs.”

“A na de lai,” she said feigning umbrage.

We rounded the last turn in the drive which ended in a large parking area overlooking Waterloo and the plain beyond.  Clifford was standing at the head of the grand staircase that graced the entrance to the house, gazing over the view now partially obscured by the Harmattan haze.  Seeing him, Kadiatu slipped soundlessly out of sight around the back of the house before Clifford became conscious of our presence.

 “There you are,” Clifford said turning in my direction.  “I was afraid you were going to be late.  Frida is almost ready to put dinner on the table.”

Despite the hospitable greeting, I could see in his gray-blue eyes that hint of introspection he often lapsed into.  

“I sent Kadiatu to fetch you a while ago, but I don’t know where she’s gotten to.”

“She brought me up the hill.  She went around to the back of the house.”

He smiled, rubbing his chin.  “She’s like a specter, that one—always materializing when you least expect it, or vanishing into thin air.  Frankly, I don’t know what to make of the wench.”

The word “wench” surprised me. It suggested lewdness in a woman, but surely, I thought, this couldn’t be his intention.

He held the front door open.  “So how are you coping—first Christmas in darkest Africa, and alone at that?”

I hesitated, guarded in my response as he ushered me into the living room.  I scanned the room for a tree of some kind, presents—some sign it was Christmas.  “It’s not as bad as I had imagined.”

“I’ve always wondered how you single chaps manage out here.”  

“Well, with Ron gone, I admit it’s pretty quiet.  I try to catch up on the paper grading and letter writing, do a little reading.  With Samuel gone, I’ve got chores around the house.  And then there’s always the work in progress—the badminton court.”

“Right-o, the badminton course.”

“My quandary is whether to finish it or fill it back in.”

  He turned to look out over the plain again. “What are you reading?”

“Back during training in the states, people talked about a book, The Ugly American.  I never had time to read it then, but found it among the steamer trunk of books the Corps sent to each of us.”

He motioned me to a chair.  “The title sounds familiar, but I’m not familiar with the work.  Striking title, I must say—who’s the author?”

“There are two authors, but I don’t remember their names.  I just started it and haven’t had time to read more than a few chapters.  I know it’s a novel about an American engineer working in Southeast Asia.  The title is a pun on the notion that Americans abroad have typically, especially in third world countries, remained aloof and isolated from the different cultures they find themselves in.   The image they project in those countries can be considered ‘ugly,’ in a sense, to the indigenous population: arrogant, pretentious, cloistered.  However, the protagonist of the novel, a rather plain-looking American engineer—the other ‘ugly’ of the title—chooses to immerse himself in the culture of the locals: living among them while offering advice and assistance to improve the quality of their lives.  His altruistic regard for Asian culture is a kind of blueprint for the Peace Corps idea.”

“Please don’t think me critical, but I dare say the Peace Corps idea, though laudable, seems a bit idealistic.  Catchy name, unlike the British equivalent—Volunteer Service Organization—but then you fellows are ahead of us in that game.  

I find the image of living and working alongside indigenous peoples—like the locals in Waterloo for example—a bit improbable.  I’m not trying to be captious, either of yours or your government’s motives, but I wonder, would you really want to live among the locals in Waterloo—is it even feasible?”

“It might be for some.  I mean there is a reality behind the notion that P C Volunteers are living in thatched huts—even if it’s not true in my case . . . or for any of the Volunteers in Sierra Leone that I know of.” 

“Well, I don’t see how they can spirit you chaps fresh from university in the most affluent culture the world has ever known to primitive backwaters the likes of West Africa and expect you to function effectively.”

“But what about someone like yourself?”

“But you see, I’ve been at this for years.  And I don’t even pretend to live on par with the natives, no more than I would live among the homeless in London’s slums.”

“Still, there must have been a time when you were inexperienced, new to this role.”

“No argument there, though I would venture that the preparation given missionaries in the Adventist Church is more rigorous and thorough than the training you received . . . what was it . . . didn’t Ron once tell me he had only sixty days of training?”

“Our training wasn’t all I had expected, for sure.  The longer I’m here, the more I’m conscious of that.  The only African ‘expert’ on our training staff was a fellow who had spent some time in Angola.”

“Rather what I imagined—most government bureaucrats responsible for these kinds of experiments in foreign policy have little or no firsthand knowledge of what they’re about—what it takes to survive in a setting like West Africa let alone win over the hearts and minds of its people.” Clifford, it was obvious, took a great deal of satisfaction in my concessions to his argument.  He had set his rhetorical hook, preparing to reel me in to his thinly disguised premise—the Peace Corps was merely a cost-effective political ploy in the cold war between the U. S. and the U.S.S.R.  

Frida appeared in the entrance to the dining room, wiping her hands on her apron.  “Hello, Stephen.  Merry Christmas.  I’m afraid we’re not used to celebrating Christmas like you Americans, but I hope you brought your appetite?”  She looked over at Malcolm.  “I hate to interrupt your discussion, but dinner is ready.  Are you two ready to eat?”

Clifford smiled smugly in triumph at her entrance, before delivering his coup de grace.  “Consider, too, that most of us have our wives and families for support—granted they generally send you out in groups of two.  But that’s no replacement for conjugal support.” 

He rose and walked over to Frida, taking her arm.  “I was just explaining to Stephen the advantages of having a lifelong partner in the White Man’s Grave.”   

Frida’s smile almost appeared forced as she slipped from his grasp.  “Stephen, why don’t you sit there,” she said, motioning to a chair opposite the head of the table where Kadiatu was setting out a few remaining dishes of food.  Feeling my eyes upon her, she shyly ducked her head and scurried off to the kitchen.

“Where’s Gavin?”  Clifford asked.

“He wants to eat with Kadiatu in the kitchen,” Frida answered.

“Well, tell him he’s to eat with us.  We have a guest—he’s being rude.”

When neither Gavin nor Frida appeared after a few minutes, Clifford issued a loud ultimatum:  “If he doesn’t get himself out here, tell him he’s going to bed without dinner.”

Frida emerged with a pouting Gavin reluctantly in tow.  I feared my presence was spoiling the mood of this Christmas feast, for feast it appeared to be: an array of festive dishes that could have fed a dozen or so people.  

“He wants to know if Kadiatu can eat with us.”  Frida’s tone betrayed an unconcealed entreaty on her son’s behalf.

“No, she’ll be perfectly content in the kitchen.”

“She’s all by herself,” Gavin piped.  “Why can’t she eat with us?”

“No, and that’s an end to it.  Now take a seat, young man, so we can say prayers and eat our dinner before it gets cold.”

When Frida and Gavin were seated, Malcolm bowed his head for grace.  Gavin, head bowed, sniffled and squirmed through the performance.  I begin to feel more uncomfortable as Malcolm thanked God for my presence in their home and at the school.  When I looked up after he had finished the prayer, Gavin was staring morosely at his plate.  

Frida began passing food, making a desperate attempt to divert the progress of the Christmas meal from its downward spiral.

“Do you like yams, Stephen?”  She handed me a bowl that had a layer of toasted marshmallows on top.

I nodded.  “This is the way my mom used to fix them.”

“So how are you faring being so far from home at Christmas?  Is this your first time away this time of year?  I’m sure you miss your family.”

“My Mom worries—she writes about twice a month.  She’s happy I’m teaching in a mission school . . . and that I’m not living in a thatched hut.  If I had a working camera I’d send her some pictures, though it seems to take forever for anything to get there—except aerogrammes.”

“Well, I hope you write her often.”

“I try.  I want to disabuse her of all the stereotypes people in the Midwest have about Africa.”

“Gavin, if you’re not going to eat, you may go to bed,” Malcolm suddenly snapped.  “Kadiatu is not eating with us and that’s final.  Now, what’s it going to be?”

“It’s not fair,” Gavin said, rising from the table with downcast eyes.  Frida watched him anxiously as he walked down the darkening hallway to his room, then softly excused herself.

“Let the boy alone,” Malcolm said.  “He’s got to learn he can’t have his way all the time.”

Frida looked squarely at Malcolm for a moment, her eyes set determinedly, then slipped quietly down the hall.  How quickly Christmas had turned sour.

It was getting noticeably dark in the house.  Malcolm threw his napkin down on the table.  “Can’t even depend on the wench to light the lanterns,” he said, striding toward the kitchen.

A palpable awkwardness hung in the air.  I sat there in the growing darkness, wondering if I should eat or not.  Malcolm came back after a few minutes, two roaring Petronax lanterns in hand, incongruous appliances, like so many things in this household: a sprawling mansion with no electricity.  

“Sorry about all this,” Malcolm said.  He looked tired, the features of his face drawn.  “I had hoped we might brighten up your Christmas a bit.  Might as well eat up,” he sighed, poking tentatively at the food on his plate.

He looked up suddenly.  “Say, I almost forgot.  Kande has decided to finish up his degree work at Fourah Bay this coming year.  He’ll be living in the dorms there.  Our mission is giving him a helping hand with the expenses, but he’s a little uneasy about leaving the wife and kids alone here in Waterloo.  He asked if I could look in on them from time to time.  I suggested you might also give a hand in that capacity.”

I hesitated a moment.  Why me?  On the other hand, why not?  This might just be the introduction to life in Waterloo that I had been looking for.  None of the local teachers had ever invited me to their homes.  “Sure, I’d be happy to,” I replied brightly.

  Frida returned after a time, but sat silently at the table and made no more attempts to be the thoughtful hostess.  She, too, seemed to have no appetite and shortly picked up her nearly untouched plate and carried it to the kitchen.  Barely audible voices in conversation from there floated into the dining room.  I looked over at Malcolm expecting to see anger burning in his face and eyes, but there was a forlorn glumness in his expression.

 It was time to make my exit.  “I didn’t bring a light so I think I’d better walk on down the hill before it gets too dark to see where I’m going.  Thank you for inviting me to dinner; the food was great.”

He didn’t extend the customary courtesy of inviting me to stay longer or summoning Frida to say goodbye.  Somehow the evening had gotten beyond redemption and I wondered what subterranean tensions that I lacked awareness of had suddenly erupted in the idyll of the happy missionary couple.  

He held out one of the lanterns, “Here, why don’t you take one of these?”  

I thanked him for the offer but demurred with the excuse that it still was light enough outside to see my way home.  So we bid each other a polite yet perfunctory goodnight.

I could feel the tensions of the evening sloughing away in the still evening air as I walked down the hill to the bungalow.  It was that hour of quietude poets often write about as dusk imperceptibly surrenders to night.  I pondered the evening’s events, recalling the irony of Clifford’s words about the advantages of having a conjugal roommate in West Africa, but soon settled into aching memories of Diane, whom I had met in a French class while tardily trying to fulfill my foreign language requirement during my senior year at the University of Missouri.  We had often taken walks at this time of day in the tranquil neighborhoods adjacent the fraternities and sororities where tenured faculty, deans and other administrators lived alongside attorneys, doctors and local business owners.  It was a pastime we relished more than taking in a movie or going to a party—picking our favorite house and peopling it with our separate but collaborative futures.  Now, I was alone, half a world away, wondering how to dispel the immutable ache in my chest.

* * * *

Ron returned a day late from his upcountry hike, exhausted but obviously relaxed and full of stories.  Trusty Silver, the Jeep Station Wagon, had broken down east of Bo on his return trip. Headmaster Clifford wasn’t too happy about having to cover Ron’s classes that day.  I volunteered to teach one, and Mr. Awodele, Kande’s replacement, a slight bespectacled fellow from Nigeria with a withered left arm, took another.  

For once, Ron just let Clifford’s sarcasm roll off his shoulders.  He talked animatedly about the dignity of the people in the smaller upcountry villages, their friendliness and hospitality, and of the raw, unspoiled beauty of the mountain countryside.  It was another opportunity to reiterate his sentiments that the village of Waterloo ought to be razed, that it wasn’t the “true” Africa but, rather, a stagnating limbo between the tribal cohesion of upcountry villages and the squalor and rampant urbanization of Freetown proper.

The Christmas debacle at the Clifford’s had renewed my resolve to get closer to the young people under my tutelage.  It seemed to me the Cliffords were sincere but wrongheaded in their mission to West Africa: they acted under the obligation of duty, not opportunity.  They were, however, clearly a step up from the white diplomats and business types I met from time to time on my trips to Freetown, who mostly came to West Africa for advancement or commercial opportunities.

My problem as a teacher, however, was that I felt removed from the work that really needed to be done in Sierra Leone which required as they say “getting one’s hands dirty”—in a positive sense, of course.  Waterloo needed an engineer like the ugly American who could insure that all the rain water that simply ran off to the sea provided a year round water supply; it needed medical staff at the local clinic to help combat the assaults of disease and disfigurement and the appalling mortality rate among the children.  It needed someone who had not become jaded or exhausted by the futility of trying to turn things around, someone with an inexhaustible reservoir of energy to organize, instill a work ethic, and lead the inhabitants to pride in their village.  What Waterloo needed most was what I and the Peace Corps hadn’t prepared for.  I was just filling an anonymous vacant slot—a round peg plopped into a square hole.  Peninsula Secondary needs a science teacher: let’s send along a Creative Writing major.

But perhaps I could do more at the school than just teach my classes and try to keep abreast of the grading.  I liked to fool around with the boys as they played soccer—“futbohl” as they called it—during the lunch break.  Soccer had been part of our daily physical training at New Paltz College, and I had developed a fondness for the game.  However, I quickly discovered these young men were out of my league, and after a few nasty collisions with the ground and some ugly abrasions that refused to heal in the tropical heat, I decided to confine my role to the sidelines.  

Why didn’t Peninsula have a soccer team?   A large area had been set aside for a soccer field but it needed a lot of work: the ground was uneven and taken over by weeds.  The kids played on a small, canted plot of ground next to the proposed field.  And they played in their bare feet despite the sharp stubble and rocks that littered the field.

One thing was evident: despite their ball handling skills, the notion of teamwork was foreign.  Samuel, clearly one of the best ball handlers, was guilty of grandstanding for my benefit.  Tempers often flared —“Bo,” a kind of equivalent to our “Dude,” was inflected a dozen different ways that signaled a range of emotions from disgust to contempt with each other’s play.

“Samuel, do you think the boys would like to form a soccer team?”

“Oh yes, sah.  But Mr. Clifford say there is no money—no money foh shoes, foh uniforms—no money to make the field bettah.  We want to play, but the boys in Freetown schools would be laughing at us.”

“So where do you play?”

“We are having a club in Waterloo.  There are games in the field by the grammar school.  Will you come see us, Mr. Livingston?”

Yes, I thought, I should.  

So I went to watch Samuel play one Saturday against a team from nearby Hastings.  Some of the players from Hastings had soccer shoes with cleats, which gave them better traction but also an advantage when trampling on a Waterloo player’s foot.  Waterloo lost by a score of 3 – 1, the lone goal scored by Samuel.

“Doesn’t it hurt when someone with football shoes steps on your feet?” I asked him as we walked to the Jeep.

“Yes, sah,” he said earnestly.  “The pain is sometimes very great, but we must do the best. The boys are having no money for shoes.”

“The next time we go to Freetown, we must get you a pair of shoes.”  Saying this, I realized I might be stepping on Ron’s toes by not consulting him first; Samuel, after all, had been hired by Ron and they had bonded long before I came on the scene.

But I quickly dismissed this thought when I saw the beaming smile on the young man’s face.  “That would be most fine, Mr. Livingston.  I would be playing more bettah then.”

* * * *

It wasn’t long after Kande’s departure for Fourah Bay College that I received an invitation to dinner from his wife.  I had never met her, nor his children, but the thought of becoming more intimately involved with this family was heartening for Kande was a personable, diplomatic guy, a staunch 7^th Day Adventist, fair in his dealings with the students.  Little wonder that he had enjoyed a greater degree of respect and popularity on the campus than Mr. Koker. 

His home in Waterloo reflected his stature as a teacher at Peninsula Secondary: one of the stucco-over-block-“tin”-roof residences and spacious by Waterloo standards.  I had never been asked to the home of any Waterloo citizen; in fact, it embarrasses me to say that after nearly six months in West Africa, I didn’t know any family in Waterloo, so I jumped at the opportunity despite my qualms about eating local “chop.”  Since my arrival, I had been troubled frequently by diarrhea; my butt was truly raw.  We boiled all our water, bought only frozen, imported meats and vegetables sealed in tin cans, but the problem persisted.  

However, I simply couldn’t pass up this invitation to get to know a Waterloo family up close and personal, even if Mr. Kande lived slightly above the village standard.  So on the Sunday of the invitation, Ron as usual having gone to Freetown, I made my way to the Kande home, my first ever sortie into the village of Waterloo on foot where, as I had expected, I quickly became an object of curiosity as I walked down the rutted, now dusty streets.

Mr. Kande had always been the picture of sartorial correctness at school.  Like principal Clifford he dressed in freshly pressed trousers and shirts, complemented by shiny black dress shoes, a necktie and well worn briefcase.  His attire put to shame our Peace Corps casualness: shorts, T-shirts and sandals.  So I was taken aback by the woman who appeared at the doorway to the Kande residence.  Slatternly is a word that comes to mind: she wore what appeared to be a loose fitting smock that bore many stains and could not disguise the braless freedom of her drooping breasts.  A half slip showed below the hem of the smock, and one shoulder kept slipping out from under the smock’s shoulder strap.  When she walked, it was that clop and shuffle gait that bespeaks a lack of energy and, to my thinking, self-respect.  Her face still held the faint remnants of a once attractive woman, but the features now lacked animation, slack like her breasts. 

She took my hand and arm immediately in a manner that was uncomfortably familiar and led me out the back door to where the dinner was being prepared.  She seemed unduly animated, recounting her trip to the market to purchase “bif” for the occasion.  When she turned to talked to me her breath reeked of alcohol.  A small thatched lean-to attached to the back of the house served as the kitchen where a blackened pot of something white boiled over a cooking fire.  A slender young girl dressed only in a dirty slip crouched before the fire.  She reached up for an open packet of what looked like salt from a shelf festooned with cobwebs, alarming a large spider which scurried for cover.

“Dis na mi pikin, Clement,” she said gesturing at the girl.  “Mr. Livingston, yu bin eat fufu?”  She leaned close to my face, the telltale fumes signaling this might not be the kind of “getting to know you” outing I had hoped it would be.  Caution was clearly the order of the day. 

“No, never had the pleasure.”  Fufu, I knew, was the gooey white staple of West African diets made from fermented cassava roots, but I had never tasted it. 

“Yu go lek dis fufu.”  Mrs. Kande was having a little trouble keeping her balance, stumbling over a small stack of dishes that lay on the ground.  “Clement! I bin tel yu, le go was dem dishes.”  Mrs. Kande scowled at the little girl whose head went down.  

“Wetin do?”  

“Yes, mama.”  Clement obediently picked up the dishes and hurried away toward the remnant of a stream, barely small puddles now, behind the house.  My appetite suddenly dimmed even more with the knowledge I would be eating from those dishes.

Mrs. Kande held up a small, stringy, discolored piece of meat for my inspection.

“A get bif na di makit tide,” she said proudly.  “Dis bi special foh yu.”  That one shoulder strap kept sliding down her arm, exposing more breast than I was comfortable viewing at these close quarters.  I had to discipline my focus.

Doubt was beginning to nag my determination to “go native.”  My expectations that this occasion would be a small step in my journey toward a better understanding of the Africans I had come to serve were undergoing serious revision.  But surely, Mr. Kande being the respected colleague he was at the school, now completing his college degree, his house indicative of his status in the community—surely, I could put aside caution and tough it out, if for no other reason for the sake of diplomacy and goodwill.  It would only be for another hour or two at most.   I swallowed hard trying to dispel the constriction in my throat.

While Mrs. Kande busied herself with the dinner preparations and occasional sips from a chipped china cup, I was left to entertain the rest of the Kande brood: another little girl a couple of years younger than Clement, and two little boys, five and seven.  Their English was limited, and my Krio even more so; thus, we spent the long wait for dinner in a Biblical Babel of cross communication.  Nonetheless, it was refreshing to interact with these energetic, bright-eyed young kids and, more especially, to be free of Mrs. Kande’s attentions.

The seating arrangement was novel to my thinking, a far departure from my experience at the Clifford’s.  I sat alone at a small wooden table while Mrs. Kande served.  The children sat on the floor just beyond a curtain where they vied with the family dogs for the food spread before them.  I asked Mrs. Kande to sit down; at first, she refused but at last brought a glass and a bottle of gin to the table.

I struggled through the dinner, trying not to gag on the “bif” sauce that one could dip or spread over the hunk of cassava.  The sauce was “hotter” than anything I had ever experienced, though Mrs. Kande assured me she had toned down the spices to suit my European palate.  Initially, I refused all offers of water, fearing it was not safe, but finally gave in when she assured me the water I was offered had been boiled at her husband’s instructions.  As I choked each morsel down I pondered calling upon a local priest to administer last rites.  I tried to imagine the revolt in my alimentary canal as it began to war with the alien, microbe-ridden invasion.  All the while, Mrs. Kande was leering at me from across the little table, her conversation a curious mixture of Krio and slurred English.

Suppressing the urge to gag, I managed to get some of the fufu down, avoiding the gristly bits of meat in the sauce.  Actually, the spicy sauce seemed to help in that respect.  Mrs. Kande seemed too drunk to notice my avoidance of her “fain bif” purchased solely for my benefit. 

 “Thank you for the dinner,” I said, rising from the table.  “You must excuse me; I have to go now.”

Mrs. Kande looked up at me, trying to fix my face in her bleary, blood-shot gaze.  “Yu no lehk mi chop?”

“No, not that.  Tomorrow is a school day—I have papers to grade . . .  lessons to prepare.  It is getting dark, and I have no light.”

“Wat bi rong wif mi chop?”

“Nothing.  I’m just not used to the spiciness,” I said.  Seeing confusion leavened with resentment in her face, I tried charades.  “You know, hot . . . hot?”  I waved my hand before my mouth as if to cool it.

She laughed, a strained, raspy sound and then lapsed into a spasm of phlegmy coughing that shook her entire body.   When she looked up again tears were streaming down her face.

Torn between wanting to turn and flee but feeling the need to comfort her, I reached my hand across the space between us toward her bare shoulder.  She caught it in both her hands and held it up to her cheek.

“Yu lehk mi?” 

Frightened, I jerked my hand from her grasp.  “I must go,” I said.

“Ten go . . . go!” she croaked in disgust.  “Yu Peace Corps lehk ohl wait man.”  She pronounded the word “Corps” like corpse.  “Tink yu betar den African.”

My role as dinner guest in West Africa , it seemed, was destined to failure.  I wanted to assure her that what she said was not true, but I held back sensing that my dissembling might only draw me further into something I was adverse to and would surely regret.  So I left without further ado.

By the time I reached the bungalow, my stomach was churning.  Ron kept a bottle of scotch for “occasions” though I had never seen him drink it or offer it to anyone else.  I got the bottle out, some ice cubes from the fridge, and poured myself a drink.  I hated the taste, but my thinking was it will either kill the microbes, flush the horror from my stomach, or both.  I poured myself another drink.  Then another.  The taste no longer bothered me.  I lay back in the overstuffed easy chair, trying to focus on the evening’s disaster, wondering who would mourn my death when I expired, as I surely would from having ingested everything I had been warned not to take into my body.  And what was it with Mrs. Kande?  She acted like a bitch in heat, certainly not like the wife of a staunch 7^th Day Adventist faculty member.  Christ, they weren’t even supposed to eat “bif.”

And then at the first wave of nausea welled up in my throat, I broke into a sweat.  Staggering toward the bathroom, I made it only so far as the door when the scotch, fufu and “bif” parted company with my body and I sank to my knees retching over and over into the foulness puddling around me on the floor. 

Chapter 9

The abortive dinners weighed heavily on my mind in the days that followed, especially the fiasco at Kande’s home.  I half expected him to turn up at our doorstep one day, demanding to know why I had insulted his wife or why I had flirted with his wife or both.  Sadly, I determined my decision to get closer to the “real” Sierra Leone henceforth would be confined to what the Minister of Education had posed as the Peace Corps mission: teach the students.

Each day I was awakened by the sun shining brightly in our east-facing bedroom window, the sounds of human activity in Waterloo washing up the hill like the inchoate voices of waves swirling up a beach.  I would check the floor around the bed for our other roommate in the bungalow, the spitting cobra, then pull the mosquito netting back as I pivoted upright at the edge of the bed, reaching deep for the courage to face yet another day.  

It seemed there was no happy medium in Sierra Leone’s weather.  I missed the changing seasons, especially the temperateness of fall and spring in the States.  Here it was either wet or dry, and the dry season took no prisoners: the monotony of cloudless days and oppressive black nights of fitful sleep, the Harmattan haze, the rationed portions of water, the unvarying routine of our daily existence—it all seemed to buzz in my mind like the relentless threnody of insect wings rubbing together.  No TV, no radio, no electricity, no flicks, no pickup games of basketball or flag football, no pizza, big Mac’s, or DQ Blizzards.  The virtue of all this deprivation was I could concentrate on the task at hand: teaching my students, trying to form a relationship with them that would make the learning process more meaningful for both of us.

Like most young novices in the teaching profession, I craved being popular with these young people whose futures had been entrusted to my guidance.  It didn’t seem all that difficult at Peninsula.  My status as a PC Volunteer—an American, and very close in age to the oldest of these students—had already distanced me from the competition, other than Ron, of course.  I considered I might easily distance myself from Ron by learning more Krio.  Ron, like Headmaster Clifford—like so many people faced with the situation of learning a new language when they didn’t have to—chose not to try.  To them our mission was to wean our charges from this distasteful vernacular—“pidgin English” to some—which both Clifford and Ron blamed for interfering with the students’ ability to learn proper English.  But slowly the realization had dawned on me that my students’ linguistic skills were something I should hold in awe rather than disdain.  The righteous indignation I had lapsed into when trying to read Samuel’s first composition was as much misplaced as Clifford’s support of that hubris.  After all, Samuel was fluent in three languages: Mende, Temne, and Krio—as were most all of my students, some of them even fluent in other tribal languages as well and learning French from Ms. Conte.  I was fluent in but one language.  

Yet to give the devil his due, Clifford had a point: the primary linguistic base of Krio was indeed “pidgin English” and the kinship between its vocabulary and English just might be a stumbling block that made our student’s efforts to learn the King’s English so difficult.

I became anxious to turn the normal relation between student and teacher on its head, for if I expected them to learn English, why shouldn’t I make a more concerted effort to learn how and why Krio, the true lingua franca of Sierra Leone, handicapped their learning of English?  The Peace Corps training had failed in this respect, for our exposure to Krio during that brief window of time during training had been cursory at best. 

Krio is a remarkable potpourri of many languages (much like English in this respect): British pidgin, Portuguese, and some 20 or so African languages such as Yoruba, Mandigo, Fula, Mende, Temne, Limba—well, you get the picture.  Though many of the words are easily recognizable cognates of English, the lilting inflections and accents of native Sierra Leone speakers can easily make it unintelligible to the English listener (true, of course, of any vernacular).

Whenever I could, I began practicing Krio with Samuel.  Samuel became my teacher, a role he relished.  At home I began hailing him with what little Krio I had learned in training:

 “Kusheh,” (hello).

 “Aw di bohdi?”  (literally, How is the body or in the King’s English, “How are you?”).  

“A wehl, aw yu sehf?” (I’m well.  How are you?)

“Oo, wi go si bak.”  (goodbye, or more literally “We’ll see you again.”) 

Krio doesn’t appear that imposing when phonetically transcribed on paper.  However, add in the unique speech patterns of native speakers in rapid-fire conversation and it quickly became unintelligible.

Samuel was an enthusiastic teacher.  As I began to pick up more of the language, and learn the nuances of its grammar, I saw how easily my English got in the way of learning Krio, and I began to appreciate the task my students faced in the reversal of that process.  To many of my acquaintances and colleagues, my learning Krio appeared to be whimsy.  For my students, however, learning English was the key to their future, though I often felt many of them were insufficiently aware of that. 

What could I do in return for Samuel’s efforts to help me learn Krio?  I asked him one day if he would like to learn to drive the Jeep.  I figured if we could find a safe place off the highway where he could practice, this would be an invaluable skill.  When I put the question to him, that broad smile swallowed his face and his eyes lit up like a row of 7’s on a slot machine.  

An abandoned palm oil compound just down the road from the school seemed like a safe place to begin the lessons.  The process would be complicated by the mechanics of coordinating the gearshift with the clutch, brake and accelerator, but, as I had anticipated, Samuel proved a quick study, so much so that one day as we returned from a lesson, having turned off the highway onto the road that wound up to our bungalow and the D.C.’s residence, I allowed him to take the wheel.  Like most young men, Samuel had a heavy foot and as we raced around the last curve I had a sinking premonition that he wouldn’t be able to negotiate the sharp turn into our driveway.

“Slow down!” I yelled.  Too late.  Samuel stomped on the brakes forgetting to disengage the clutch and the Jeep plowed through the uncut grass at the entrance, sliding to a bucking, heart-pounding stop just inches from a huge ironwood tree.

“Jeez, Samuel,” I exclaimed, “you almost wrecked the Jeep!”

His eyes blazed with excitement and fear, and in the seconds of release that followed I fell into a helpless fit of laughter.  Samuel regarded my hysteria suspiciously at first, then he too joined in my laughter.

* * * *

My mother had always been a compendium of those clichés we call adages:  distillations of experience shoring up the wisdom of people like my mom, raised in rural settings without the advantage of even a high school diploma.  One such gem warned of breaking down the social walls that separated a boss from his workers, royalty from its subjects, and teachers from students: “familiarity breeds contempt.”  Without realizing it, I had embarked on an old object lesson for all teachers who want to be popular with their students.

Over the many months I had now been in Sierra Leone, I had grown accustomed to tokens of respect from the majority of its citizens.  I was, after all, a “wetman” (whiteman) which (due to centuries of colonial rule) automatically conferred status—the assumption that I possessed power, wealth, education.   I was, after all, a school master who rode around in a Jeep, lived in a tidy bungalow in the hills above Waterloo, and had the money to shop in the finer stores in Freetown.  Yet I tried to wear my status as casually as I dressed; I was an American after all, not some snobby Brit.  I was a child of the French Revolution, was I not?   Liberté, égalité, fraternité—I had been brainwashed by my upbringing to pay lip service to the notion that all men were created equal and had certain inalienable rights.  We were all part of the brotherhood of man.  But months of being dressed as “masa,” “boss,” “sir,” even “Your lord worship,” had left a latent residue of class or perhaps even racial consciousness in how I perceived myself in relation to Sierra Leone’s native citizens.

I began to see—or at least I thought I saw—a growing disrespect in Samuel’s demeanor at school, especially in the classroom.  He had always enjoyed a certain status at school as our houseboy, a status rivaled only by the three students who lived and worked at the Clifford’s household.  He occupied a small albeit substantial outbuilding next to the bungalow, he enjoyed a small stipend from us to help defray his living expenses, he had access to some of the comforts of our bungalow and to our help with homework, and he had the privilege of riding to and from school each day in the Jeep. He had always possessed a swagger at school that I found slightly irritating, but I realized I was partly responsible for this, especially now that I was giving him driving lessons.  Lately, however, in the easy smile and ready laughter there often seemed to be a hint of mockery, and my mother’s warning kept me alert for signs that the wall of propriety, dividing Samuel’s station in life from my own, was about to be breached. 

That breach came without warning one hot, airless afternoon in my Second Form English class.  It was a lesson about verb tenses, one of the most frequent aberrations both in the writing and speech of the students in this particular class.  No air moved through the louvered windows.  The girls were fanning themselves with their exercise books; the boys sat sullenly, the perspiration beading on their foreheads and blossoming in dark crescent-shaped stains at the underarms of their white shirts.

In the notes I had made from my Krio sessions with Samuel, I noted that the past tense of a verb was either established by context or by the marker “bin.”  Thus, the English sentence “I killed the snake” becomes “A bin kill di snek.”  The cognates in the Krio sentence make the sense recognizable, but the past tense marker “-ed” has been replaced by “bin” which appeared to be a cognate of the English “been.”  Irregular verbs, the bane of all students of English (those verbs that change tenses through phonetic transformations such as “go” becoming “went” in the past tense) appeared not to exist in Krio.  

“A de go na tohn” (I am going to town) becomes “A bin go na tohn” in the past tense.  Krio had got around the problem of that morphing in the spelling of irregular verbs by reducing all verbs to their stem form and adding an auxiliary (the trick English uses to form the future tense).   The papers I read nightly were riddled with verb problems.  Ironically, however, the more I studied it, the more logical and accessible Krio seemed to be in this small country with nearly fifteen different tribal languages.

I decided to test my observations with the scholars.  Perhaps if we made this kind of comparative study of the two languages, rather than dismissing Krio out of hand, it might at least make them more self-conscious of the reasons for the “errors” in their writing and speech.

I did this with some trepidation, however.  Speaking Krio on the Peninsula campus was a no-no, as was the case at other Sierra Leone schools; offenders were often sent to “brush” the school grounds—cut its weeds—by the African teachers, the very people who spoke it in the privacy of their homes and in their daily intercourse with fellow citizens of Waterloo. 

The lesson seemed to grab the attention of most of the class: they were the Krio experts and I was the English Master and together we attempted to chart the differences in verb tenses.

I wrote on the blackboard, This palm wine tastes very good.  “How would you say this in Krio?”

There was laughter.  Breaking classroom taboos grabbed their attention, and I had just doubled the ante by breaking another taboo with my choice of topics.

“Dis buli ya de tes fain.”

I was surprised that Hannah had spoken up, for she was always the role model of Adventist propriety.  She had a broad, knowing smile at this moment, however, as she looked around the class seeking acknowledgement and approval.

“How would you say in Krio,” I asked while writing on the board the English sentence, “This palm wine tasted good yesterday?”

“Dis buli ya bin tes fain yehstade,” Kadiatu said, cupping her hand over her mouth to hide a giggle she couldn’t suppress.

I noticed that Samuel kept turning in his seat to talk to the student behind him during all of this.  Was he upset that I was using the knowledge he had given me to make a point in class?

I wrote the sentences on the board.  “Notice the tense markers,” I said.  “‘De’ for the present tense and ‘bin’ for the past tense.  What are the tense markers in the English sentences?”

Mohammed, our star pupil at Peninsula, had his hand up.  “Isn’t it the ‘-d’ on taste, which shows the action is in the past tense?”

“Good!  Okay, so instead of an auxiliary verb like ‘bin’ in Krio to indicate the past, in English we make just a small change like adding a ‘-d’ or an ‘-ed’ to the end of the verb stem—at least for regular verbs.”

John Coker, the largest young man at Peninsula and the best natured, had his hand up.  “Mr. Livingston, can you please tell us again the difference we are seeing between the regular and irregular verbs in English?”

I could hear Samuel’s whispering again as he conversed with another neighbor.

“Samuel?"


  He looked at me in surprise which seemed spiced by a degree of annoyance.  “Sah?”

“Can you answer John’s question?”

“What question, sah?”

“Maybe if you weren’t talking with your neighbors so much, you would know what John’s question was.”

“A noh de tohk tumohs, Pa,” he said in a barely audible voice.

The sudden rush of indrawn breaths sucking what little air remained from the classroom made it clear that Samuel had breached the invisible wall that created the notion of classroom decorum.

“What did you say?” I bellowed into the stillness of the classroom.

“Please, sah.”

“What was it you just said?”

He looked down at his desk.

“Go, wait for me outside on the veranda,” I commanded, pointing at the door.

Samuel rose reluctantly from his seat.  “Please, sah.”

“Go!” I barked

Head down, Samuel made his way toward the door.  For reasons I couldn’t understand, I found myself shaking, a sudden rage in charge of the nerves in my body.  I looked blankly at the top of the teacher’s desk, trying to collect my thoughts, trying to focus on what to do next.  Finally, I found the scrap of paper I had scribbled the day’s homework assignment on and turned to copy it on the board, barely able to quell the spastic movement of my hand as I wrote.

“I want you to start working on this assignment,” I said to the class as I walked toward the door.

 Samuel was waiting on the veranda, confusion and fear flickering over his face.

“You will report to the headmaster’s office and tell him you have been assigned by me to cut brush on the compound,” I said curtly.


“Please, Mr. Livingston, what have I done?”

“You know what you’ve done.”

“Please, sah, I don’t know what is the matter.”  His hands were extended, palms up in a plaintive gesture to suggest his ignorance. 

“You know you were being disrespectful in class.”

“No sah.  I would not disrespect you.”

“Please keep your voice down,” I said, trying to read in his eyes whether he was lying or simply took me for a fool.  “You spoke to me in Krio and addressed me as ‘Pa’.”

“Please, sah, ‘Pa’ is used when speaking with respect to an older man.”

“Am I an older man?”

“Well no . . . yes!”  I thought I could read confusion and hurt in his eyes, but there was no turning back.  It was Samuel’s day of reckoning; he needed to be put in his place.

“Go to the office and tell them you are to brush the compound.”

I knew this was a blow to his ego, because second only to the task of cleaning out the latrines, being assigned the menial task of cutting brush on the compound with a machete was considered beneath the status of scholars, a punishment to be avoided at all costs.  The shame was immeasurable for a scholar of Samuel’s stature.  

The humiliation was even greater because his ego had been pumped up for over a year due to his status as Ron’s houseboy.  And no doubt he had bragged how I was giving him driving lessons.  So be it, I thought.  Some strange compulsion had taken control of me: I was filled with indignation: I wanted my pound of flesh even though vaguely conscious of acting like a tyrant in meting out this punishment.  Cutting brush on the compound in the hot afternoon sun was not for sissies.
  
      I have read many messages in the faces of West Africa: insolence, subservience, visceral rage, untrammeled joy, inconsolable grief.  But when Samuel returned to class in his sweat soaked uniform later that afternoon, his downcast face and abject bearing spoke loudly of only one thing: if humiliation was my aim, I had hit the target dead center.



                                  Chapter 10

As I lay there in the diffuse predawn light, unable to fall back into sleep’s oblivion—my focus on the ceiling veiled by mosquito netting, wondering exactly what time it was—a song kept playing in my head.  I’ve often wondered how many other people experience what I call the “song for the day” phenomenon—that snippet or refrain of music that keeps looping through consciousness, sometimes pilfered from the distant past, dredging up visual images with  melody.  Music has always been the bedrock of my emotions, and I’m sure this is true of many others, else why do people whistle, hum, or actually sing in the shower, and others make millions of dollars with their uncanny ability to pluck at the ethereal substance of our feelings.  

It was Stonewall Jackson again: “Waterloo! Waterloo!”  How many times over the past months had I distinctly heard that voice, the plaintive refrain, reminding me of my predicament  in West Africa?  What had brought me—of all the Peace Corps Volunteers not just in Africa but in all corners of the globe—to this small island in time called Waterloo?  

Noises coming from the bathroom suddenly pried me from my reverie.  I looked over at Ron’s bed.  The disheveled sheets and gathered mosquito netting told me he was already up.  I could hear a barely audible voice and the noise of his daily ablutions coming from the bathroom.  The thought of our daily ration of wash water already turning milky in the sink was one of those tedious reminders of life in the dry season that accumulated like so many straws upon the camel’s back.  At night we would empty the water into a bucket which already held the day’s used water from the kitchen sink, then use the contents to flush the toilet.  Ron had coined a variation on the old lyric, “If it’s yellow, go outside, my fellow./  If it’s brown, flush it down.” 

I found myself slightly unsteady on my feet as I walked to the bathroom and peered around the door opening, half expecting to see someone else in there with him.

“Who you talking to?”

He looked at me quizzically.  “Nobody.”

I shook my head.  “How the hell did you stand it here by yourself last year?”

He was toweling his face.  “I couldn’t,” he said, examining his reflection in the mirror.  “If it weren’t for the Jeep and closeness of Freetown, I’d probably be back in California right now.”

Three white pieces of lint clung to the beard stubble sprouting from his once permanent five o’clock shadow.  I pointed at them. 

Groping awkwardly in the mirror’s reflection for the lint, he half turned to me, a question in his eyes.  “Heard you had a little tiff with Samuel.”

I returned the questioning look, wondering whether Samuel was the source of the rumor.  “Who told you that?”

“Some of the kids were talking about it.”  When I didn’t volunteer any information, he continued.  “Want to tell me what happened?”

“What do they say happened?”

“They say you sent him to brush the compound—something about he was disrespecting you in class.”

“Isn’t brushing the punishment for speaking Krio in the classroom?”

“Well, maybe . . . if you’re an African teacher.  I didn’t think you were into that kind of old school punishment.”

“He was disrespectful in class.  I asked him a question because he wasn’t paying attention to the lesson and he not only responded in Krio, but he addressed me as ‘Pa.’”

“Somebody said you were teaching them Krio in class,” he said, squeezing past me as he headed to the kitchen.

I found myself trailing after him, speaking to his back.  “I wasn’t teaching them Krio.  I was trying to show them the difference between the way verb tenses are formed in Krio and the way they are formed in English.  I was hoping it might help them with their English.”

He removed the tin of Klim powdered milk from the pantry and retrieved a jug of boiled, filtered water we kept in the fridge.  “Look, I don’t think these kids know what entrapment means, but getting them to speak Krio in class, and then punishing them for it, sounds a little like entrapment to me.  And in case you don’t know it, referring to you as ‘Pa’ is not disrespectful.  If he had addressed you as ‘Bo’ that might be different.”

I watched him stir the powdered milk into the water a little over zealously.

“But you don’t understand.  His disrespect didn’t begin and end with his speaking Krio and addressing me as ‘Pa.’ It was the context of it all.  Even the kids in the class knew he had crossed the line.  He was not paying attention in class and talking to his neighbors while I was trying to conduct a lesson.”

“In Krio?”

“For Chris’ sake, I told you, not in Krio, but about Krio—its relationship to English.”

“And you think what he did deserved the punishment . . . the humiliation of being sent to brush the compound.”

“I did . . . in the heat of the moment.  I just reacted . . . maybe I overreacted . . . I don’t know.  Hell, I’ve never taught school before.  I did what I thought might be expected in the situation . . . it was hot, he seemed out of line . . . I don’t have a playbook of what punishment fits what infraction.”

“Listen, I want to tell you something . . . this is just between us.  I hired Samuel as houseboy last year for a reason.  I think there’s something special about this kid.  Not everyone shares my opinion, of course, but that’s beside the point.  

“I’ve been trying over the last year and a half to rebuild his self-confidence.  Sure, he’s cocky at times, but that’s a defense mechanism.  He was ready to quit school when I took him on in Form I.  He’s got no family, no relatives in Waterloo.  And that goddamned priest at the Grammar School had been molesting him for years.  That’s how badly he wanted an education.”

I was stunned by the revelation, for this was in the days before the sins of the “Fathers” had been publicly acknowledged.  Yet at some conscious level I too would have denied, I was acutely aware of the male beauty of this young man.  

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I figure the fewer people who know the better,” he said downing the glass of milk.

I let out a long sigh at this unexpected news.  It seemed everything I did to get closer to Africans, young or old, was destined to bite me in the ass.

“Should I apologize?”

“That’s your call.  What you need most is to get your nose out of those exercise books and get out of this fuckin’ crap hole on the weekends.  It’s Africa, my friend.  It sneaks up on you, particularly in the dry season.  I’ve seen it happen too many times.  Clifford’s a prime example: basically, he’s straight arrow . . . tries his damndest to keep Peninsula from going under.  Based on what I’ve seen and heard from other Volunteers, we’re lucky to have him.  But he’s too fuckin’ wound up; he’s gonna pop one of these days—you wait and see.  

“The two of you are similar in that respect.  Take my advice: get out of Waterloo, a little R and R on the weekends.  Let this thing with Samuel be a warning.”

I tried to consider what Ron said carefully.  Maybe he was right.  I had always believed I could take isolation and discomfort better than most, that I could lose myself in the successful completion of a task on my own terms and be the better person for it.  It had worked in college—no pain, no gain, they said.  But so far my vain attempts to do the right thing in Waterloo kept turning on me the way the war had turned on Napoleon.

  “Phil says he’s met a couple of good looking chicks.  He’s invited them to a picnic on the beach this weekend.  Nolan’s coming.  Why don’t you come along?  Maybe one of us will get laid.”

I tried to remember the last time I had been to Freetown—it had to have been before Christmas.  A couple of days at the beach, a little swimming, volleyball, soccer, going to one of the nightclubs on the beach in the evening, a few brews, a little dancing with one of the female Volunteers from Freetown or visiting from upcountry, a little story swapping—it suddenly seemed more appealing than it had before I began staying in Waterloo on weekends.  I was tired of playing the masochist, isolating myself in Waterloo.  If nothing else, it was a chance to sit and listen to Nolan’s classical music collection which he had had shipped from the States in a steamer trunk.

“I don’t want to be the fifth wheel.”

“Hell, I’m already the fifth wheel.  Nothing like a little competition to take your mind off this dry season grind.”

Phil’s chicks turned out to be “jailbait” as cruder minds are wont to say.  One was only fifteen, the daughter of the Israeli counsel to Sierra Leone, and the other sixteen, her father a Pakistani official with the UN.  Unselfconscious in their revealing bikinis, these young ladies lived up to the promise of Phil’s advance billing—even if younger than we were led to expect.  And the more we talked to them the more we were all struck by their surprising maturity.  

Phil directed Ron to drive to a small, deserted cove south of the main Freetown beaches.  Like Nolan, I had no particular fondness for Phil, but this afternoon proved to be one of his finer moments.  His introduction of these young beauties to Nolan, Ron and to me appeared to have no hidden agenda.  After he had pumped them with questions about their lives on the drive to the beach, Phil took off on his own to reconnoiter the surrounding area.  He reappeared about an hour later swimming towards us from the ocean.  So the lopsided ratio of guys to girls was happily reduced for that interlude from 4 to 2, to 3 to 2.

For once, I thoroughly enjoyed the idyllic afternoon and the release it afforded on that secluded beach.  The memory still lives bright and distinct in memory, despite finding myself in the role of fifth wheel.  Nolan was smitten immediately by the younger Israeli girl, Katia—Ron by the beauty from Pakistan, Sabina.  Ron’s infatuation, was an anomaly from the get-go.  We figured, man of the world that he was, he would soon tire of this young schoolgirl, especially given the nineteen year gulf in their ages.  Even to most of his fellow Volunteers, at least those in my group, Ron seemed ancient.  But in the weeks that followed our outing Ron and Sabina became an item, and we were all surprised when her parents didn’t intervene immediately to squash this budding romance.    

Something about Katia immediately appealed to me.  She and Sabina were no ordinary teeny-boppers: they didn’t blather on in mindless teen talk.  They had sophisticated opinions about world affairs and life in general.  And though their parents were part of the international diplomatic corps and might have sent their daughters to exclusive schools, they chose instead to have them educated at the Annie Walsh School for Girls in Freetown.  

Katia was the less bubbly of the two, more guarded and confident in her opinions.  A hint of amber caught the light in her unabashed brown eyes.  Unlike Sabina, she didn’t energize her conversation with gestures.  Though the younger of the two, her jet black hair was faintly grizzled adding a tantalizing mystery and allure to her youth, traits which, combined with the purposeful curiosity that punctuated her conversation, made us all quickly forget that here was a young woman barely beyond puberty.

Nolan began dating Katia immediately, but it was awkward since neither he nor Phil had wheels.  He became dependent upon Ron for transportation to the cinema and beach on the weekends, so it was inevitable that the two began double dating.   But it wasn’t long before he chaffed under this yoke of dependence, for Ron and he had decidedly different agendas about what constituted appropriate entertainment.  In a moment of daring, which seemed completely out of character, he decided to commit the ultimate no-no: purchase his own wheels.  

The Peace Corps had laid down very strict rules about personal vehicles and the few Jeeps apportioned to Volunteers were shared among those who lived in the most remote areas.  Ron was the exception, a perk he zealously guarded.  Waterloo was backward, even primitive, but not remote.  None of the Volunteers in Freetown was allowed to have a vehicle.  The Corps assumed that we would live at the level of our in-country peers and be compensated accordingly.  Since West African teachers couldn’t afford cars and made do without them, the Volunteers would have to follow suit.

Nolan had managed like most Volunteers to put money aside in savings from his monthly stipend.  We didn’t have families to support and our housing was provided by the Sierra Leone government (food was really the only necessary expense) so it was relatively easy to build up a savings account.  From day one Nolan had chaffed under the rules concerning transportation: if Volunteers could afford to buy transportation then why not let them.  Phil, however, took up the argument of the Corps: this would allow Volunteers whose families in the States had money to purchase vehicles.  Jealousy would result among the Volunteers (as if there wasn’t any already).  Voila, Pandora’s Box would spring open, and the Corps’ determination that Volunteers should live on the same level as their in-country counterparts would be jeopardized.

Nolan didn’t buy into this line of reasoning.  “Screw their damn rules,” was his dismissive response.  Like every young American beyond age sixteen, he assumed it was his birthright to move about independently on some manner of gas powered vehicle.  Still, to be inconspicuous and stay out of trouble with the Corps, he elected to downsize his desire to a Moped which he ordered from Freetown’s P-Z department store.    

The purchase alleviated a growing case of depression, and he was ecstatic when Ron and I next visited Freetown, proudly but secretively showing off his new wheels hidden in a storage area underneath their house.  

“Listen, you guys,” he whispered conspiratorially, “this is just between the four of us.  If I hadn’t bought this, I’d probably be headed home this summer.  Please,” he pleaded, “don’t tell anyone or my writ will be in Carter’s tinger.”

“How can you possibly keep this a secret?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “But if they take it away from me, I’m packing my bags and booking the next flight out of here.”

It sounded like the threat Ron had made to the Corps a year earlier.  “Will you leave your classical music collection with me?” I was trying to lighten up the seriousness of his threat.

“Very funny,” he said with a menacing glare.  “I’m serious.  No offense, but if you and Ron can have a government issued Jeep in Waterloo, then there’s no acceptable logic that says I can’t buy my own Moped.”   

The Moped gave Nolan the freedom he craved, but it didn’t appear to score points with Katia.  Jaunts to the beach were okay because the route was essentially level.  The same was true of evenings at the cinema or trips to the Freetown department stores.  But with two aboard, the ridiculously underpowered vehicle struggled to climb the Colony hills—truth be known, it struggled with even one aboard.  And it was in the Colony hills where Katia’s parents, like most of the international set, inhabited an Eden-like stratum with spectacular views of Freetown and its crown jewel, the sparkling Atlantic harbor.

So Nolan soon found himself again trying to arrange double-dates with Ron and his coveted Jeep station wagon.  Frustrated in my fifth-wheel status, I returned to my isolation in Waterloo on weekends.  It was after one of those weekends, about a month later, that Ron returned on Sunday evening with news that Nolan wanted to see me the following weekend.

“What about?”

“Why don’t you let him tell you?”

“Why all the mystery?”

“No mystery.  He just prefers to talk to you privately.”  Ron could see the consternation in my face.  “Look, I think it’s something you’ll be pleased about.”

And so I was.  Nolan informed me on our next weekend visit that Katia no longer wanted to go out with him.  She wanted me to ask her on a date.  The only problem I had with this was its impact on Nolan.  I mean, how could any girl ask someone she is breaking up with to be the message boy to the next guy she’d like to date?  And how could any red-blooded American guy actually be the bearer of such a message.  Sure, I wanted to go out with Katia: it was the best boost to my ego since I had arrived in Sierra Leone.  But what I felt for Nolan was an ignoble mixture of empathy and contempt—he was my best friend after all.  And not only had he played messenger boy, he had actually arranged the time and place of our first date and had secured Ron’s promise to double with Katia and me so we would have transportation.  Matchmaker, matchmaker!  Cynic that I was, I figured Nolan was certain Katia would soon tire of me as she had of him; then I, too, would be initiated into his lonely-hearts club.

* * * *

At least once a month, a Fulani trader stopped in at Nolan’s compound.  The tall, nearly toothless figure, clad in a sheer flowing robe, floated up the steps one weekend.  The robe and red fez created an aura of exotic places—Marrakech, Timbuktu.  He knew full well there were fools ripe for picking gathered at Phil and Nolan’s place on weekends, so their compound had become a regular stop on his itinerary—as least as regularly as could be expected on African time.  He traveled with a younger, smaller man, his beast of burden who staggered up the stairs to Nolan’s place under the massive bundle of his master’s wares.

“Afta-nooon, mastas,” the trader called through the bars of the security door.

“Afternoon, Ali,” Phil said.  “Nolan, Ali’s here.”  

“Who?”

“You know . . . Ali, the trader.”

I was nursing a Star beer at the dinner table, engrossed in Nolan’s copy of Nabokov’s Lolita.

Phil was the type who never bought anything from traders, but always had them trot out all their wares, cross-examining them about each object as if seriously considering a purchase.  A couple of Volunteers wandered out from the spare bedroom into the living room, curious to see what this West African entrepreneur had to offer.

Ali’s lackey unfolded the large bundle in the middle of the living room floor where the trader took a seat on one side, carefully tucking his legs beneath him in the pose of an anorexic Buddha.  I glanced up from Lolita expecting to see the usual assortment of African kitsch one might expect in a souvenir shop or airport lobby: ebony carvings, ivory bracelets, knives, a couple of wicked looking masks, whose likeness I had already seen dozens of times, no doubtless crafted in Nigeria or perhaps another more aggressive labor market like Taiwan.

The young man with Ali was silently unraveling a filthy rag wrapped around a misshapen carving.  When he was finished he tried to stand the statue on the edge of the thin blanket, but it continually toppled on its face due to the imbalance between a grotesquely distended belly and its complementary humpback.  The trunk-like legs were disproportionate to the spindly arms.  Dirt was still caked in the crevices of the rough-hewn wood as if it had been recently unearthed.  Here was the stooped figure of a naked old man bent nearly double by the slings and arrows of misfortune.  Yet between his legs swelled evidence that his manhood was grandly intact.  It seemed Ali was finally offering something other than the mass produced junk he usually tried to unload at inflated prices.  The statue appeared to be an authentic museum piece: whether from the carver’s imagination or struck from life, here was the likeness of a creature who had suffered all the sorrow Africa could heap upon human kind, who had stoically endured his Maker’s malevolence with Job-like patience.

Nolan caught the covetous gleam in my eyes as I silently appraised the statue.  A similar light flickered in his eyes.  Ali, no doubt, intercepted those looks, envisioning a bidding war that would be to his benefit.  No one else in the room seemed particularly interested in this misshapen figure of affliction, most likely due to its instability.  

Ali plucked the statue from the edge of the blanket and raised it in the air like a priest lifting a holy relic.  “Dis na fain piece—veri fain, veri spehsha.  Yu lik um, ya?”  He thrust the statue at me.  

I tried to look disinterested.  Shifting my gaze to the other items arrayed on the blanket, I picked up a better than average ebony carving, turning it over in my hands.  “Ow much dis?” I asked.

“Faiv pound,” Allie replied, lowering the grotesque carving back to his lap, then laying it on the floor beside him.

“Too much, Pa,” I said, laying the ebony piece aside.  Ali eyed me suspiciously now.

Nolan walked over to where the trader sat and gingerly picked up the grotesque statue.  “A giv yu faiv pound foh dis.”

Ali looked offended.  “No masa, dis piece veri old, veri spehsha.  Fifteen pound foh dis.  One of a kind,” he said in distinct English.

Fifteen pounds?  Holy crap, that was nearly fifty U.S. dollars.  Nolan laid the piece back on the floor, shaking his head.  My heart was quaking in my chest, and my hands started to sweat.  I had never heard Ali set a price that high for any of his wares.  The old guy was either an uncommon con artist, or we were in the presence of an authentic piece of African art.

“Seven pounds,” I said weakly.

Ali studied me for a moment then threw up his hands.  “Foh yu, masa, spehsha price—twelve pound.”

I shook my head.  Uncertain how much money I had, I pulled out my wallet and counted the contents on the floor in front of me, not a particularly good bargaining gambit. 

I laid the stack of notes in front of me and looked over at Ali.  “Dis all a get.  Eight pounds.”  I opened the empty wallet and held it out for his inspection.

Ali shook his head sadly.  “Ten pounds,” he said.  “Finish.”  

I threw up my hands in helpless resignation.  The old man looked around the room to see if anyone else was interested in bidding.  Seeing no response, he beckoned to his assistant to rewrap the statue.

Nolan walked up behind me and held two pound notes over my shoulder.  “Take it,” he said.  “Woody,” as he christened it, “stays with me one weekend a month.”

“You sure?”

“Hell yes I’m sure!  I’ve never seen anything like it.  It’s a masterpiece.”  

I took the two notes, added them to my pile then pushed it across the blanket to Ali.  There was a moment’s hesitation, but he said nothing and gestured to his assistant to hand over the statue.

I cradled my purchase like a newborn—it was mine.  I felt flushed, expansive, possessed by the treasure in my arms.  I was breathing the rarefied air of those tomb raiders who finally stumble upon antique exotica while combing remote and barren landscapes for treasures of the past.  Of course, it wasn’t wholly mine, but I was hopeful I could prevail upon my minority shareholder to give up his interest in this treasure at a later date—for the right price.  I would be generous, of course.

* * * *

Three weeks later, the very weekend it was his turn to babysit the statue, I sat down across from Nolan and slid two pounds across the dining table.

“What’s this for?”   

“The money I owe you for the statue.”

‘Oh no you don’t.  Woody’s one-fifth mine!” he said, pushing the money back in my direction.  “Speaking of which, where is the troll of Waterloo?  This is my weekend to have it, so hand it over.”

“I don’t have it.”

“You forgot it?”

“No . . .  I don’t have it anymore.”  I said, trying to avoid direct eye contact.

“What do you mean you don’t have it?”

“I don’t have it. . . . I gave it away.”

“You what?”  He gaped, apoplectic in disbelief.

“You heard me.”

“It wasn’t yours to give away.  I own a share of that sucker.  Who the hell would you give it to anyway?”  Nolan was ranting now, out of his chair pacing the floor like a madman.  “And why, for Chrissake?”

“I gave it to Katia.  I thought you’d understand . . . I wanted to give her something special.”

“Oh my God . . . oh my God!  Jesus, do you know what you’ve done . . . what you gave away?  We had an authentic piece of African art, god knows how old . . . god only knows it’s true value . . . and you gave it to Katia?  Oh my god . . . I don’t believe this!”  He was shaking his head wildly; I had never seen him this upset.  “Has the damn heat fried your brain?  What were you thinking?”

I had no answer really.  It was one of those gestures of largess that foolish young men often make.  I was infatuated . . . yes, with a fifteen-year-old.  What token of my feelings might impress this young but worldly daughter of the Israeli diplomatic corps—and possibly her parents?  I gave it away, a feeling only gods can claim when they bestow some token of grace on a mere mortal.  I felt as a mother might feel giving up her child for adoption.  Silly figure of speech—silly me, and yet, there it was.  What was done was done; I couldn’t ask for it to be returned.

Yet in the weeks that followed, I often wished I could overcome my pride, retract my ludicrous act of beneficence, ask that Woody be returned.  My relationship with Katia lasted no more than four dates if memory serves me right.  One of those dates has almost wholly vanished from memory; it was the first date that Nolan set up. We went to see a movie at the Roxy cinema; we sat in the five bob balcony seats . . . and that’s all I remember: not what we talked about, not the movie, not what we did afterward.  

 Another date, a torrid night on the beach, the cool pockmarked sand sucking at our toes as we sloughed barefoot to a spot where I spread a blanket.  We lay there for awhile, listening to the ceaseless, rhythmic ebb and flow of the surf, searching for the human likeness supposedly residing in moon’s brilliant face, wagering on the destinations of freighters whose distant lights moved imperceptibly like the minute hand of time southward along the coast.  She was staring up at the night sky when I leaned above her and kissed her fully upon the lips.  She returned my kiss and suddenly we were enmeshed in a passion that lasted a few rare minutes.  

It was as if the red light of caution flashed in both our minds simultaneously.  In one moment passion and in the next an unmistakable slackness in her embrace and my own backpedaling from the precipitous lip of desire.  Her flesh felt cool and I tried simply to hold her to restore warmth.  But it was like trying to restore warmth to a mannequin and finally I rolled over on my back as she rose to a sitting position, grabbing her own shoulders in self-embrace. 

That episode gave me pause about the future of a relationship with Katia.  Still, when I returned to Waterloo and began obsessing daily over the hollow feeling in my chest and the memory of that first kiss igniting our passion, I knew I couldn’t walk away from whatever its promise might be.

The president of the Seventh Day Adventist mission in Sierra Leone, dropped by our bungalow after school one day.  Ron and I noted he was driving a new, white VW Bug instead of his red Renault Dauphine.  Pedar Knudsen had been the pastor of the Freetown Seventh Day Adventist Church before becoming president of the entire Sierra Leone mission.  He was indeed a man on a mission, not so much the mission of spreading the gospel or saving souls as he was in advancing his own career within the church.  Pedar, his wife Birgitte, and two boys lived upcountry in Bo in a beautiful, tastefully landscaped compound of half a dozen buildings with all the 20^th century amenities.  However, his little red Renault Dauphine was no match for the many miles of rutted, washboard roads he had to travel around Sierra Leone.  VW’s had proved their toughness on the bush roads to his satisfaction, so now he had two cars when he needed only one.  I had complained to his sympathetic ears once about the ridiculous Peace Corps policy on vehicles.  Lately, the Jeep had spent considerable time at Toufik’s garage in Freetown, which left Ron and me scrambling for transportation.

Pedar had a used car dealer’s crafty grin on his face that day as he made a proposition: I could have the Renault, which he had kept in good condition, for £300 and I could pay for it in six monthly installments of £50.  I was, at the time, worried about transportation for my second date with Katia—an invite to Waterloo to a party Ron and I were throwing for friends from Freetown.  The Jeep was in the shop.  We had been walking to and from school.

Emboldened by Nolan’s success at keeping the moped a secret in Freetown, where the Peace Corps headquarters was located no less, and reveling in imagined idylls of independence and the pride of car ownership, on impulse I shook hands with Pedar, encumbering myself with  debt for the next six months.  But I was now the proud owner of something no other Volunteer in Sierra Leone had—my very own car.  I had never even had my own car in the States!  Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead!

On the day of the party, I drove to Katia’s home where I was introduced to her insouciant yet wary parents.  On the road to Waterloo, she pumped me with questions about the car—where did I get it, how could I afford it, how was I going to keep it a secret, what would happened if I got caught—but seemed quite excited that she was party to my clandestine enterprise.

Though Waterloo was little more than twenty miles from Freetown, the narrow, poorly paved route was filled with its share of torturous curves, dips and single lane bridges as it threaded its way around the base of the Colony hills, so what in the States might have been a twenty minute drive took forty-five.  Having exhausted her questions, Katia lapsed into silence which I paid little attention to; after all, on our first date she had told me Nolan’s ceaseless babble while they dated had annoyed her: it was one of the main reasons she wanted to break up with him.  Dusk was approaching and since I had no insurance I was intent on my driving, alert for stalled vehicles in the road, people, animals, enjoying the natural air-conditioning of the cool evening air as it washed through the open windows.

“Why don’t you say something?”

Stunned by the imperative tone of her question, I limply replied, “What?”  Adrift in reveries of my good fortune, I wasn’t prepared for the question.

“Say something . . . talk to me.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t care—anything.  I’m going nuts.  Anything would be better than this silence.”   

“I thought you liked silence—isn’t that why you broke up with Nolan?”

“You two are like polar opposites: Nolan never stops talking—you never start.”

“That old cliché, the ‘silence is deafening’?”

“Sort of.  I mean people are social animals, aren’t they?  They talk, they laugh . . . they interact.  We’re not clams.”

The rebuff seemed a trifle inane, yet it stung.  She was either accusing me of being anti-social or, more devastating, lame in the art of conversation.  But what was the big deal—driving alone in silence, attuned to your own thoughts.  It was so much easier, much less phony than simply “making conversation.”  Luckily by then we were approaching Waterloo and I gave her Ron’s take on the village.  At the advanced age of twenty-two, I still had not learned the art of conversation is fueled by a natural curiosity about the other.

Our final date proved to be the wrecking ball of this brief relationship.  This time Katia invited me to her house.  Her parents were gone and she had also invited Sabina and a minor bureaucrat from the German Embassy whom she had met at an embassy function, a stout, florid young man, probably in his late twenties, who behaved like an arrogant holdover from the Third Reich and regularly introduced his remarks directed at me with “You Americans.”  He obviously had already had a few drinks before I arrived.  

We Americans were first and foremost naïve in world affairs, a point he drove home by revealing my embarrassing lack of knowledge about the world.  And the natural corollary to that proposition was We Americans had an education system that was clearly not the equal of European education, particularly Deutschland’s.  Sabina, bless her soul, became noticeably uncomfortable with his rude and relentless exposure of my ignorance in the arenas of politics, economics, and geography, trying valiantly to defend the Peace Corps’ mission.  Meanwhile, Katia sat in her lounge chair silently watching him carve up my ego.  I kept wondering what her agenda was: she, an Israeli, inviting this pompous Nazi over to blitz what little pleasure might be derived from our conversation.  When I could take it no longer, I excused myself, saying I had to get to another engagement.

That afternoon left the proverbial bad taste in my mouth.  I didn’t hear from Katia again for a couple of weeks and I was too stubborn to invite more ego-bashing by initiating a rapprochement.  Nolan, having renewed a casual friendship with her, informed me that “our” statue had been installed on the front lawn of her parents’ home, nakedly exposed to the elements.  I took it as a symbolic gesture.  A month or two later when the rains began, Nolan conveyed more news of Woody’s demise: termites had invaded the unprotected wood and it had begun to crumble—sawdust to sawdust.  

The short affair with Katia had proved a bust, a learning experience to be sure.  My once shiny but still encumbered Dauphine now gathered dust in the garage, serving as a constant reminder of this failed encounter with the fairer sex.  I had a car, but nowhere I wanted to go.  Woody’s treatment at Katia’s hands soured my disposition even further.  I could hear Sinatra each day in my head: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. . ..”

                                              Chapter 11

“Okay, you guys, pay attention!”  The torpor of the dry season had invaded the classroom as it had every other corner of daily life.  Where had the enthusiasm for learning, which I had witnessed the previous September, fled?  Science still piqued their fancy, but English, the subject most likely to open doors for them, seemed to hold their interest no more than Latin held mine in high school.  Their writing skills over the past eight months showed little improvement.  Krio still intruded in their attempts to express themselves in the King’s English.  Why was I failing in my attempts to reach them?  Teaching had become, as Ron had so succinctly put it, a grind.

“Mariama, what is the difference between the active and passive voices in English?”  The concept of active and passive voices often proves difficult even for native English speakers, so this lesson would, no doubt, be an uphill struggle.  Tall and angular, Mariama was acknowledged by both her peers and teachers as top girl in Form II, just as they considered Mohamed top boy.  Getting her input seemed like a good starting place.  It had worked before.

“Please Mr. Livingston, I am not understanding these ‘voices’.”

“What don’t you understand?”

She shrugged indifferently.  “I do not know.  The lesson is very hard.”  

I feared if I pressed too hard she would, as she had once or twice before, retreat into the bashful coyness that would checkmate any further response.  Her head rested on her upper left arm which rested on the desktop, almost as if napping.  But her eyes tracked my movement to the front of the teacher’s desk.  The expression on her face held a measure of anxiety, but also betrayed her indignation at having been singled out for this challenge.

“Why is it difficult?”

“Please sir,” she said, sitting up, but sighing as she did so.  “The book is not explaining—how can words be having voices?”

I looked at the other members of the class who had perked up a little.  “Good question, Mariama.”

I walked around the desk to the blackboard.  “Let’s forget the word ‘voice’ for a minute and concentrate on what actually happens in two different sentences that describe the same thing.”

I wrote on the board: “Mariama was attacked by a baboon.”  A shy grin crept across her face and she looked away.

I scanned the other members of the class.  “What is Mariama doing in this sentence?”

Joseph had his hand up.  “She is being attacked,” he said with his usual supercilious nod to the class.  

“Yes, she is being attacked, but what is she doing?”

Joseph’s smugness dissolved into dismay.  Daniel had his hand up.  “Please, sir, how can we be knowing?  Maybe she is gathering firewood . . . or just going to the stream to get water.”

“Very good, Daniel.  Who or what is doing the attacking?”

Joseph wasn’t going to stick his neck out again.  Daniel thought for a moment, then answered.  “The baboon.”

“Okay!  But notice that ‘Mariama’ is in the subject position of the sentence even though it doesn’t say what she is doing.  That is why we call this kind of sentence the passive voice: the action in the sentence is performed by the baboon even though Mariama is the subject of the sentence.”

I didn’t see the light of understanding in any of their faces.  “Since she is not performing the action, we say she is passive—she is being acted upon by the baboon.  Now, how could we rewrite the sentence so that it describes the same thing, but Mariama is no longer the subject?”

I had a little more of their attention, but the notion that the same thing could be expressed in different ways left them puzzled.  I looked back at Mohamed but he was bent over, scribbling furiously on his foolscap—trial sentences no doubt.

“Tell you what.  Whoever first gives me the correct answer, I’ll take to the Roxy Cinema in Freetown.”

Others in the class began scribbling on their own foolscap, but Christiana’s hand shot up immediately.  Christiana Cole, a sloe-eyed beauty from Hastings, was considered by the boys the prettiest girl at Peninsula, this on good authority from Samuel.  She was tall but not angular like Mariama, with the classic light olive skin of many Krios—also unlike Mariama.  An indifferent student, she was acutely aware of her status as Peninsula’s beauty queen.  Occasionally, there were flashes of intelligence from her in the classroom, but they were never sustained.  She knew her effect on men, and that’s largely where her focus lay, though the Mende and Temne boys who looked on in helpless adoration had little chance to gain her favor.

Without hesitation she said, “A baboon attacked Mariama.”  She covered her mouth to cover the obligatory giggle.  Mariama looked embarrassed.

Chauvinist that I was, I stared at her in disbelief.   Never in my wildest dreams had I expected one of the girls, particularly Christiana, to answer the question correctly.  Mohamed, yes; Daniel, maybe.  Now what the hell was I going to do?

“That’s right, Christiana.  Very good.”  Trying to cover my disquiet, I wrote her sentence on the board then slipped into my pedagogical mask.  “You see how she put the baboon, which is doing the action, in the subject position?  This is what we mean by the ‘active voice’.  The sentence describes the exact same thing as the first one I made up, but it is now in the active voice because the subject, the baboon, is doing the action.”

My dilemma, however, still hung in the air.  I sensed the class had already put two and two together: I would be taking Christiana to the cinema—these kids were familiar with the term “date.”  I had trespassed into slippery footing, deep doo-doo territory, especially if word got back to Headmaster Clifford.  But how could I renege on my promise?  

Another winner!  It was the only way out.

“Now, whoever can write this next active sentence in the passive voice will get to come with Christiana and me to the Roxy.”  I wrote on the board a more challenging sentence: “Benga repeatedly defeated the British army during the Hut Tax War.”  

I hoped their fondness for the biography of the Temne warrior Benga (Bai-Bureh) which we had been reading in our literature class would hold their attention.  Then an awful thought struck: what if Christiana answered this one correctly?  My face burned as I pointedly ignored her side of the room.

Fatmata Kamara raised her hand.  Fatmata, as her name possibly suggested, could best be described as full figured.  She wasn’t truly fat, but marriage would soon remedy that.  She had a handsome, mature face and went to great lengths to hide her upcountry origins principally by straightening her hair.  

“The British army was defeated by Bai-bureh during the Hut Tax War.”

Dumbfounded once again, this time the tension began ebbing as I turned to write the sentence on the board.  Fatmata had never distinguished herself as a scholar, but somehow the correct answer had issued from her mouth.  

“Very good, Fatmata!”  You just saved my ass, I thought.  

A murmur went through the boys in the class.  Undaunted, buoyed by dame fortune’s smile, I asked the two girls to see me after class so we could arrange a date and time for their reward—our trip to the cinema.   

* * * *

Ron’s prophecy that Headmaster Clifford would soon “pop”—snapping like the pencil he had held in his hands when they argued about the benches I had made for the science lab—soon came to pass.

Kei Bangura, the face of innocence in Form I, the precocious younth with elephantiasis, had become increasingly a problem as the dry season progressed.  I wondered how much of this new behavior might be due to his leg.  Normally, the symptoms of this disease, even if contracted when young, do not manifest themselves until later in life.  The unsightly damage it inflicted, however, could easily make him a pariah at this sensitive age.  

Each day he became more unresponsive in class and often spoke and acted with borderline insolence.  I had caught him writing on his desktop with his pencil, passing notes in class, even tormenting the little girl in front of him.  Everything I tried in the way of discipline seemed to have only a temporary effect on his new behavior, and I feared he would soon lapse into complete disrespect or similar acts unbecoming a “scholar.”  Still, it was impossible to levy harsh punishment upon Kei: first, there was the memory of my blundering attempt to discipline Samuel; but a greater deterrent was this young boy’s grotesque affliction.  The shit hit the fan one beastly hot day without warning when I caught him carving graffiti in his desktop with the top of his pencil.  The eraser was completely worn down and he was using the edge of the metal cap that had once held the eraser to carve his initials on the desk. 

Snatching the offending pencil from his fingers, I hooked my hand under his armpit and abruptly ushered him to the headmaster’s office just two doors down from the classroom.  Someone else with more authority and experience than I would have to handle this problem.  Clifford was sitting behind his desk, intently tallying figures on a hand cranked adding machine.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Clifford, but I caught young Kei here, carving initials in his desktop.  His negative behavior seems to be escalating lately, so I thought we ought to pay you a visit.”

Clifford looked up from his work with an impatient glare that seemed to bore right through Kei.

“What do you have to say for yourself, young man?” he bellowed.

Kei returned Clifford’s stare momentarily as if assessing the situation, then cast his eyes sidelong in the direction of a filing cabinet standing in the corner of the office.

“Do you realize how much one of those desks costs?”

Kei’s eyes remained fixed on the filing cabinet.

“Look at me, young man, when I talk to you.”

The boy’s eyes tracked from the filing cabinet to the floor in front of Clifford’s desk.  I wondered in the back of my mind if he had ever been brought to the Headmaster’s office before.  It was hard to imagine anyone disciplining this picture of innocence with the horribly disfigured leg.  

“I said look at me!” Clifford commanded. 

But Kei stubbornly kept his eyes fixed on the floor, refusing to meet the headmaster’s eyes.

The legs on Clifford’s chair screeched as he jumped up from his chair. Unbuckling his belt, he pulled it through the loops of his trousers.  “Mr. Livingston, I think it’s time Mr. Bangura learned what happens to young boys who deface school property.”

I watched in alarm as Clifford rounded the desk in Kei’s direction.  Kei, however, knew instinctively what to do—run, or hobble as the case was, around the opposite end of the desk keeping it between himself and his assailant.  From my vantage at the door to Clifford’s inner office, I could see the animal fear in Kei’s wide eyes.  My impulse was to intervene, but how?  I was still pondering how bringing the boy to Clifford’s office had provoked this reaction.

“Stand still young man and take your punishment!” Clifford commanded.  Unleashed rage flashed in his eyes, an exploding astonishment at the impudence of this scholar who refused to submit to punishment.

Like raptor and prey they circled the desk, our esteemed headmaster yelling at Kei to “Take his punishment like a man!” and flaying the air with his belt.  White spittle had formed at the corners of Clifford’s mouth, and each time he admonished the poor boy to stop and take his punishment, the words flew on flecks of saliva.

Suddenly, Clifford decided to leap upon the desk to cut off Kei’s escape.  However, he misjudged the desk’s height and his knee collided with the desktop’s sharp edge.  Clutching his leg, he hobbled backward in pain collapsing on the floor.  As I ran to help Clifford, Kei saw his chance to escape and fled from the office.

I have often wondered about my paralysis that day, my failure to intervene.  Was it a sense of awe—not awe as conveyed in the modern, hackneyed sense of its derivative “awesome,” which once upon a time denoted an extraordinary act or event?  Clifford’s behavior did seem extraordinary, no question, but my reaction is best described only by the archaic use of awe: I was in the presence of something dreadful, a feeling of terror and fear.  A cold, unimpassioned lashing might give rise to sympathy for the victim.  But an incident like I had witnessed, where a pillar of rectitude and civilized behavior suddenly—if only for those few fleeting moments—sheds the ever-so-thin veneer of restraint and lashes out in visceral rage, gives one pause to ponder the essential nature of human behavior.

Clifford did no serious damage to his knee, but the lingering pain of the blow left him limping for a few days.  Young Kei disappeared, never to return to Peninsula.  In my mind was the memory of my own father taking a belt to me a couple of times, but never with the demonic countenance I witnessed in Clifford that day.  When I related the incident to Ron, he merely gave me that knowing “I told you so” look.  And, of course, I kept recalling how I had “popped” when I thought Samuel was disrespectful in the classroom.  “It’s Africa, man; it sneaks up on you.”

  As the weeks passed, I kept assuring myself the brief interlude with Katia was best put behind.  Besides her youth and callous disdain for the precious gift of Woody, a more troubling concern kept nagging me.  It had taken her German acquaintance to bring it into focus: What the hell was I doing hobnobbing with the diplomatic set?  Rubbing shoulders with members of this international coterie had been a heady, irresistible attraction.  That last episode at her house, however, reminded me I was not just out of my element.  More to the point, I had been ignoring the reason I had been sent to Sierra Leone. 

Yet despite all this, that period of time evoked emptiness.  I felt as if was living in exile.  I was no more at home in the classroom than I had been in the company of the elect.  I tried to convince myself I had no more desire to see Katia again than she me.  I enjoyed taking the Renault out for a spin, the fatuous pride of ownership and the freedom of the open road.  But as Pedar had learned, the little Renault was no match for Sierra Leone’s upcountry roads.  Trapped, wanting to drive into Freetown to show off my wheels, I was all too keenly aware that such a display might be cause for my immediate dismissal from the Corps, the dishonor of being sent back to the States.   The freedom I had hoped to gain was on a short leash, tethered to Waterloo.

During these agonizing hours and days, when time’s winged chariot seemed dragged along by a team of lethargic mules, my thoughts always drifted back to Diane, the young woman I had dated during the last year at Mizzou.  I remembered the long walks we took at dusk and at night, up and down the streets of  Columbia, especially in the affluent neighborhoods, plotting a future in our imaginations, my longing to seize the day, to seize her in an embrace.  But like Eliot’s Prufrock I had walked the streets—not alone—but nonetheless stuck in my role as “an attendant lord,” hearing her voice in my head as I might try to embrace her, imagining her turning her head away saying, “‘That is not what I meant, at all’” or delivered in the devastating modern vernacular, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”  

Why couldn’t I keep my focus on the business at hand, the bold, ground-breaking enterprise of our Commander in Chief?  I certainly had not been trained and transported to West Africa at my country’s expense simply to seek out liaisons with members of the opposite sex.  And yet the reality was I could not stop that awful longing lodged somewhere between my breast and brain for carnal intimacy with another being.  It wasn’t simply a case of my prick responding to the prospect of getting laid—as Ron would have described it—like a divining rod to underground water.  The ache left by the longing was real.  No pain reliever would make it go away and memory, like alcohol on an open wound, only made the pain more intense.

Signs of the rainy season’s return began to appear.  Evenings, Ron and I would sit on the porch at dusk sipping Star beer while watching the lightning flicker in the clouds forming to the east out over the flat upcountry plain.  I relished those moments: the anticipation of rain after prolonged drought from our vantage point on the hillside above Waterloo.  At night, sometime between eleven and 1 a.m., I would be awakened by winds buffeting the mosquito net, billowing it like a sail, or the sharp retort of an unsecured window slamming shut in the living room.  My bed was on the east side of the bedroom, next to the windows.  Ron, on the other side, slept through it all while I scurried to the living room where our school papers were flying about. 

The storms swept from east to west, to the sea, with nightly regularity.  As the days wore on, the winds began to carry short rains in their wake.  The spray of moisture as the rain blew through the open windows and up against the mosquito netting stirred me from the inertia of interrupted sleep.  Fighting the claustrophobic mesh of netting, I rushed to close the windows.  But the storms passed quickly.  In the evenings before the nightly storms a flurry of insects attracted to the light of the Petronax lantern became a signal for lights out, time to hit the sack.  Each morning I was amazed to see piles of insect wings littering our desks and the floor.

“What the hell are these?” I asked Ron.

“Termite wings, most likely—some call them flying ants; they shed their wings once they emerge from their colonies.  They’re a nuisance this time of year.”

“There must be thousands of them!”

“Millions, more likely.”

On morning drives to school, the pavement was damp, the rain water collected in a few standing puddles, the air at last stunningly cleansed of the Harmattan haze.  One morning, as we descended the hill and drove toward school, we found the road covered with debris: leaves, broken limbs, even fallen trees.  But nothing prepared us for the shock when we pulled into the school parking lot.  The previous night’s winds had hit the campus with unexpected fury.  Most of the cantilevered roof that faced east over the Form I classrooms had been lifted from its moorings and flipped upside down in the field behind the building.  The peak of the metal roof over the science lab had been peeled back half the length of the room like the skin of an orange.  

  Clifford wore a sullen look of despair, but he had his sleeves rolled up, as he barked orders to staff members and scholars.  By some miracle the roof over his office was partially intact.  It seemed the first order of the day was to round up the scholars for assembly.  They were wandering aimlessly about the compound in small cliques, wide-eyed, exclaiming “Lie-la!” at the damage done to the school. 

“Bit of a mess, I’m afraid,” he said, flashing only momentarily the customary sheepish grin.  “First, we’ll have assembly, of course, then I’m going into town—see if I can get some extra hands to help clear away the debris.  Perhaps you lads can organize the scholars, salvage what you can from the classrooms—everything’s wet—I’ve sealed off the office and asked the night watchman to stand guard.  

“We’ll forgo classes today—put together an emergency plan for holding class until we can temporarily repair the roofs—pray for no more rain tonight,” he concluded breathlessly.

“What happened?”  Ron asked.

“Microburst most likely . . . not something we planned for when the buildings were put up.  The roof over the office is still intact; you might want to put important, salvageable items in there . . .move the desks from the Form I block to the Form II building.  I’ll be back to lend a hand shortly.”

Clifford walked with his usual brisk stride toward the parking lot.  I mounted the steps to the Prep and Form I classrooms and peeked inside Koker’s homeroom.  Water stood in puddles on the uneven concrete floor.  The fiber ceiling tiles were soaked and stained; a few had fallen to the floor due to the water’s weight; others bulged, pregnant with their loads.  Clifford had warned students to stay out of the classrooms so they gathered at the windows peering in.  I grabbed Koker’s pointer from the corner of the room and, seized by some antic urge, began stalking the aisles between the desks.

“Benga kill de lion,” I shouted, thrusting the pointer up into the tumid belly of a tile.  Why not, I thought: the tiles are ruined anyway and will have to come down, full of water or no.  So I thrust the stick harder, again and again, till water poured through the small, dark hole.

“Look, de lion bleeds.  A go finish im!” I cried.

Some of the students began chanting, “Benga!  Benga!  Benga!”  The audience began applauding my thespian debut and I could no longer suppress the latent ham within.

I attacked another bulging tile.  “Kill de lion,” the students shouted, then fell silent.

“Mr. Livingston, what are you doing?”  Mr. Koker’s stentorian voice thundered above the crowd outside the classroom.

Go away, old fart; you’re spoiling my fun.  I turned to face this new adversary, ready to plunge the pointer into his belly, but instead slowly lowered my weapon.

“Mr. Livingston, you’re ruining the ceiling of my classroom!”  A murmur ran through the students who stood gapping and whispering at the windows.

“Alright, alright!  Get away from the windows you little bush babies!  There is work to be done.  Joseph, get some of the boys to remove these desks from the room immediately.”

He turned to me, a frown deeply furrowing his face.

“They’re already ruined,” I said, pointing to the stained and sagging tiles.

“Did the Headmaster give you permission to destroy them?”  Koker’s tone made it clear he held the higher moral ground in this interrogation.

“I was letting the water out before more of them fall down and make a bigger mess.”

“Well, perhaps you should be looking after your own classroom, and I will be looking after mine.”

“Alright,” I said sheepishly.  I had been playing the fool and suddenly felt a keen awareness of how ludicrous the display must have appeared—a white schoolmaster in full manic exhibition.  Still, the students had enjoyed my moment of comic relief.  My problem in the role of school master was the closeness of my own age to those of the scholars, a space of no more than three or four years from the oldest.  My role as English and Science Master had bestowed a status and with that a dignity I simply found impossible to sustain.  At twenty-two, my kinship with the students was closer than it was with my middle-aged colleagues.

Joseph and five other scholars filed into the room.  “Mr. Koker, where are you wanting the desks?”

“Don’t interrupt me with foolish questions when I am talking to one of the other masters.  Where are your manners?”  He turned to me.  “You see, Mr. Livingston, what happens when you become familiar with the scholars?”

The boys rolled their eyes then stared at the floor.

“Take them outside to dry.  Go get a mop and bucket.  Be quick about it.”

I picked up a desk and started to carry it outside.  “Mr. Livingston, the boys will do that,” Koker said sharply.

“Just thought I’d help.”

“No, no, that is their work.”

I carried the desk out anyway.  In the background I could hear Mr. Koker making low clucking noises of disapproval.  But I had the sinking feeling he was right: I should go assess the damage in the science lab instead of playing the fool before the students.

The lab classroom was in better shape since only one row of the corrugated metal roofing had been peeled back.  The classroom still had no ceiling, so no bulging tiles.  Some of the tables at the back of the lab were damp.   Debris littered both tables and floor.  Thankfully, the roof over the storage room where the chemicals and equipment were kept had held.  The storeroom window had been broken in the storm but other than blowing a few papers and supplies about, the damage minimal.  I went back into the classroom to examine the roof more closely.  It looked like something I could fix, at least on a temporary basis.

A few of the girls had been sent to fetch drinking water from the stream behind the lab.  As they walked past the lab windows balancing the buckets on their heads I heard them giggling and talking excitedly as they made their way across the field separating the science lab from the rest of the classroom blocks.  Curious at their excitement, I looked across the field and saw Clifford with three or four helpers he had recruited from the village and a few of the school boys.  They were struggling to untangle the remnants of the roof from Form I.  He was stripped to the waist, his pale, lean body curved like an etiolated plant long deprived of sunlight, and I knew immediately why the girls were giggling.  Remembering Clifford’s insistence that the girls keep their blouses on when sent as punishment to brush the compound, it seemed as in countless other instances that when cultures collided, the ironies became exponential.

Koker and Awodele stood off to one side in the shade of a tree still dressed impeccably in their slacks, shirts and ties, Koker shaking his head at the spectacle the headmaster was making.  Because of his withered arm, I hadn’t expected Mr. Awodele to be involved in the cleanup but Koker had no such excuse. I have to admit I was pleased that Clifford, headmaster of the school and preacher on the Sabbath, refused to stand on ceremony, but had “rolled up his sleeves” to join in the work that needed to be done.  Watching Koker, I wondered what had created the condition of privilege I often witnessed in African teachers, their disdain for manual labor.  Sheer laziness?  A lassitude fostered by the tropic heat?   A sense of entitlement descended from a tribal culture?  Or was it simply the stepchild of colonial rule?  

Yet such behavioral distinctions were not new to me: back in the States invisible forces drew lines between the labor assigned to white and blue collar labor, between management and the workers it supervised, and especially between white males and the minorities, immigrants, and women in their thrall.


     *                    *                    *                    *



PART II
“But to continue my narrative.  I said to myself that we are all accidents of history in accidental conjunction.  All a matter of perspective, yes.”
—Robert  Penn Warren


Chapter 12


“Mr. Livingston, you will pay me ten pounds.”
I tried to keep my focus on the road, on my driving, tried not to let the quaking shock of Christiana’s words tear the Jeep’s steering wheel from my hands.  The seismic pounding of my heart registered the aftershocks of her demand.  God, what had I gotten myself into now!  Preoccupied with damage control, my mind pressed to assess the losses: how catastrophic would be the cost of this feeble attempt to seize the day?
I fought to regain my composure.  “For what?”
“For letting you make love to me.”  Her voice was cold like the edge of winter’s blade.  It contained a hauteur I could never have imagined in a young African girl, particularly a student—my student!
“We didn’t make love,” I returned icily.  “We kissed . . . that is not making love.”
She mulled the response in silence for a few minutes.  “Then you will pay me five pounds.”
It was like bargaining for fish at a roadside market.  “Don’t be silly.  Men don’t pay for a girl’s kisses.”  I wanted to remind her that it was she who had removed her dress and slithered over the passenger seat into the back of the Jeep in her slip, beckoning me to join her.


The evening had begun innocently, or so I thought.  I had made arrangements with Ron in advance to use the Jeep and left him with the keys to the Renault.  The Roxy attracted P C Volunteers on weekends; I didn’t want to risk having to explain the little red car in addition to why I was taking two female students to a movie.
Dusk was approaching as I drove to pick up Fatmata in Newton, a small village about seven miles east of Waterloo.  My plan was simple enough.  After picking up Fatmata, head back toward Freetown, pick up Christiana in Hastings and drive the two of them to the Roxy.  I asked for directions at the first hut and, after much discussion and consternation, was informed of a dwelling where Fatmata might live, which turned out to be a case of misinformation.  However, there the owners and I were better able to communicate in a bouillabaisse of Krio and English and they directed me to another hut close by.  Yes, Fatmata lived there with relatives, but she was not at home; no one was certain of her whereabouts.  Why was I looking for her?  What did I want?  By then, I figured either she had forgotten our trip to the cinema, or she had not taken the classroom promise seriously.  I would already be late to pick up Christiana, so I asked the woman I was speaking to, purportedly Fatmata’s aunt, to tell her niece I was sorry, but I had to be on my way.
As I sped toward Hastings, I began to reflect on the evening’s possibilities.  How fortuitous that only Christiana would be accompanying me.  It was, in fact, turning out to be a “date” after all, and the excitement spread like a wind driven fire into my groin.  Hold on there, partner, I counseled the sudden swelling in my shorts.  This young woman is your student; you are her teacher!  Let’s not spoil the evening doing something you’ll most certainly regret.  Yet all kinds of bold visions danced in my mind.  Who knew what the gods had in store?
The main artery in Hastings was a rutted narrow lane just as it had been in Newton, though Hastings was more town than village.  Still, the side streets wouldn’t accommodate vehicles the size of the Jeep.  Luckily, Christiana’s house, a two-story affair, was one of those lining Main Street.  The structures had no front yard and sat up high from the level of the street, reminiscent of the buildings along main thoroughfares of old western films.
Unlike Fatmata, Christiana had given explicit instructions how to find the house, and I immediately spotted her perched on the front porch railing, her long, lovely legs swinging back and forth in impatience.  An older man whom I surmised was her father sat in a worn, stuffed chair behind her.
She was wearing a colorful short dress showing off those splendid legs, a print with vivid orange and green abstract patterns of fruit.  Her hair was done in neat cornrows though I had half hoped, half expected it to be done in some more glamorous fashion requiring the tortures of straightening.  Still, her demeanor, as usual, bore the assurance that she was fetching in whatever hair style she chose.  She definitely looked older than her sixteen years.
Dutifully but brusquely, she made the introductions.  Her father’s crisp English contained little of the marked West African accents I had become accustomed to.
“Where are the rest of the girls?” he asked.
I noted his use of “girls” in the plural.  I had been trying to frame an excuse for Fatmata’s absence in the event this question was posed.  Before I could open my mouth, however, Christiana intervened.  “We’ll be picking them up on the way to the movie in Freetown.”
She gave me a quick conspiratorial look that indicated we were about to embark on an adventure whose dissembling prologue had already been narrated to her father in order to obtain his permission to go.  I nodded my assent while trying to guess the particulars of what she had already told him.  Like any co-conspirator, I was anxious our stories marched to the same drummer.
We said our farewells to her father, Christiana rather abruptly as she climbed into the Jeep and I with awkward effusiveness, yet fearing all the while her father might step down from the porch and walk over to the Jeep, then wonder, since there was no back seat, where the “rest of the girls” would sit.
“Why is there no seat in the back?” Christiana asked, as I started the Jeep.
“Mr. Patterson and I removed it when we were hauling building materials for the repairs on the school.”  In my rush to pick up Fatmata, I had forgotten until I climbed into the Jeep that the back seat was missing.  No matter, I thought at the time; the three of us can squeeze into the front.  “What would you have told your father if he looked inside the Jeep?”
Christiana didn’t answer the question, but looked at me with a sangfroid that said she would have thought of something.  Dusk had fallen, so I turned on the Jeep’s headlights.
“You are late,” she said, pouting.  “Where is Fatmata?”
“She wasn’t at home,” I answered.  “I tried to find her; that’s why I’m late.  I don’t know . . . maybe she forgot this was the night we were going to the Roxy.”
She said nothing further as we re-entered the highway bound for Freetown.  I racked my mind for questions that might dispel the silent treatment I seemed to be getting.
“Where does your father work?”
“He is employed by the Freetown Water Department,” she grunted.
“Does he ride the bus or train to Freetown?”
“He has a motorcycle.”
More silence.  When she spoke again, she turned her head toward the passenger window.  “He wonders why a white teacher would be taking scholars to the cinema.  African teachers would not do that.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you are American.  You are a Peace Corps; you are not British or missionary. You are not an African teacher.  I explained to him the contest about English.”
“What did he say?”
She shrugged her shoulders.  “It’s okay.  He likes Peace Corps, but when he saw you, he say you are very young . . . you have red hair.”  She giggled.
And so we raced onward into the uncharted territory of our “date.”  Remembering Katia’s admonishment about my silence, I groped for more questions about Christiana and her family, especially her father, who, by African standards, seemed to be a man of some means.  Why did he choose to send her to a new Adventist school in Waterloo?
“My father likes Headmaster Clifford.  He says Mr. Clifford is an honorable man.”
“Is your family Seventh Day Adventist?”
She giggled again as if at a joke I wouldn’t understand, then in mocking tones said, “Mr. Livingston, we are not Adventist.”
When we arrived in the vicinity of the Roxy, there were no parking places in front of the theater, so we left the Jeep in the care of a young man who promised to watch it for a fee.  Rumor was your tires might be slashed, even removed, if you didn’t ante up.  He eyed Christiana closely as we dickered over the price.  Why were there no police in an area where extortion appeared to be so flagrant?
There were more direct and sidelong glances as we walked to the Roxy and joined the queue to get tickets.  My stomach tightened as I felt more acutely the threat, real or imagined, that a racially mixed couple posed to the “natural” order of things in the 60s, even in West Africa. I had no idea what movie was playing.  Waterloo had no newspapers and only one phone in the train station/post office.  Ron and I depended on Freetown Volunteers for news about what was playing at the Roxy and whether or not it might be worth seeing.  This evening’s fare would have to be a case of “what you see is what you get.”
As has happened with so many movies I have watched over the years, having seen it left no lasting register of its content.  Perhaps it speaks to the transience of the medium; perhaps it was one of those easily forgotten Hindi or Hollywood B productions.  Or perhaps I was so totally consumed by paranoia I couldn’t focus on the flickering images before me.  We sat in the two bob seats on the ground floor, a first for me, and it put me in mind of the stories my professors at Mizzou had told about the pit where the “groundlings” congregated in Shakespeare’s theater.  Our neighbors were boisterous, talking, even shouting occasionally, ignoring the courtesies ushers in the States enforced.  Their raucous interaction with the film seemed to be the social norm, the air laced with invective and argument, the louder the better.
I was certain I could feel the press of eyes upon us, the mixed race couple.  As the evening progressed, Christiana slouched lower in her seat.  With her height and my short torso, I first assumed she was doing me the courtesy of trying to make me appear bigger.  As the movie progressed, however, I wondered if she was trying to make herself less conspicuous.
When the movie was over, the flag of Sierra Leone appeared on the screen and the national anthem played.  The majority of the people in the two bob seats began noisily milling toward the exit, ignoring the music.  A scattered few of us stood at attention, mouthing the words.  Christiana started to file out, but not sensing me behind her, turned and seeing me still standing by my seat flashed a momentary look of embarrassment.  It is a feat of memory I cannot comprehend, that after nearly fifty years I still remember the words so clearly:
High we exalt thee, realm of the free;
Great is the love we have for thee.
Firmly united ever we stand,
Singing thy praise, O native land.
I knew, ironically, that most of the ex-pats in the five bob balcony seats would be standing at attention, singing the anthem while shaking their heads at the spectacle of disrespect below.  It was easy to forget that Sierra Leone had claimed its independence from Great Britain no more than two years earlier and that devotion to an intangible concept like country had not yet displaced its citizens’ ties to their tribal roots and to the Paramount Chief who symbolized that ethnic bond.  Krios, like Christiana’s ancestors, had a fugitive and relatively recent history as immigrants to West Africa.  Their bond with the small Freetown Colony was stronger than any allegiance to the far-flung British Protectorate which now made up the bulk of the land mass recognized as Sierra Leone.
I had fretted about the Jeep all through the movie, worried that I had bartered too harshly with the budding entrepreneur who had promised to keep an eye on it.  I was relieved when we found it just as we had left it.  Climbing back into the Jeep, Christiana slid down to the same slouch she had assumed in the theater, but she positioned herself closer to me than she had on our way to Freetown.  Now, indeed, to passersby we surely looked like a couple on a date.  I sensed she somehow had a degree of familiarity with this posture.
Driving back toward Hastings, I noticed that Christiana kept scooting in little increments across the seat, till finally all that separated those lovely legs from my own was the driveshaft hump on the floor.  Surely this movement was her invitation for me to make my move.  I felt the lustful tingle again, the switch that would stiffen the swelling probe in my crotch.  Running through my mind was the cavalier logic I had studied in the carpe diem poems of the late 16th and early 17th centuries—the seductive call to seize the day, or carpe noctem, as was the case in my present circumstance.  “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”  What invisible hand held me back?  “Now, like amorous birds of prey,/ Rather at once our time devour.”
Yet in my mind endless previews of consequence played—her father awaiting our return on the front porch of their home, a stern frown furrowing his brow.  The shame of a Peace Corps teacher glutting his lust with a female student—Clifford, belt in hand, ordering me to stand and “take my punishment like a man.”  The greater shame to my family, my mother’s only son—his ticket through the pearly gates already punched by baptism at age nine—off in Africa, wallowing in the God-forsaken mire of moral turpitude.
Would I always be simply some poor, wimpy, Prufrockian doorstop doomed to let life’s golden chances pass him by?  I looked into Christiana’s eyes and she returned the look with doe-like submissiveness.  A swift current of recklessness swept me further from the quietude of indecision that had marked all my previous encounters with women.  I began to search the roadside for a place to turn off and park.  We came to the turnoff Ron and I had taken during my first trip to Waterloo.  A fleeting image came and vanished: that stubborn old man who had conned a ride for his wife and kids and their leaking bag of rice.
I turned off onto that same laterite road where we had the flat tire in the pouring rain.  Trusty, made-in-America Silver eased to a stop about a hundred feet from the highway.  I doused the lights.  Lightning flickered in the distance, but the sky above us was perfectly clear, the moon burnishing the nightscape in a silvery patina.
I gave no thought to Christiana’s genetic origins, racial features so exotically different from any other woman desire had drawn me to.  It only mattered that here was willing, concupiscent flesh, inviting me to taste the bliss that since time immemorial had driven men to conquer and kill, to seize the promise of rapture with imperious necessity.  Fate had finally directed me to this moment, a moment beckoning with such primal possibilities it made my arms erupt in gooseflesh.  There could be no murmur of “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”  
The moment fell upon us like no other in my short lifetime—like stepping off the edge of a chasm in darkness, trusting to the soft embrace of water below, a step neither of us could retract: I to make love to a young black woman, my student; she to surrender her favors to a “Peace Corpse.”  I seized her just as I had finally seized the moment, cupping the back of her neck with my right hand to bring her face closer to mine.  We kissed, lightly at first, then more deeply.  My tongue tasted—perhaps “felt” would be more accurate—the fiery remnants of the spicy dinner she had eaten hours earlier.  Did I, as romantics are wont to say, throw caution to the wind?  Not entirely.  Like a game between opposing baseball teams—Caution and Carpe Diem—Caution’s pitcher hurled several throws over to first base holding me to the bag.  The first throw, those peppers still burning in my mouth; throw number two, an image of her father waiting on the front porch.  Then a third throw—the  fear that some night wanderer on the road might come upon us.
Suddenly, she broke free of my embrace, and balancing with one knee on the seat as she faced me, she pulled her dress up over her head, her lithe and nubile body now clad only in a short, shimmering rayon slip which barely covered her panties.  She leaned forward and I harbored her passion in my arms.  We fell to kissing again.  Feeling the warm contours of her body beneath the glossy coolness of the slip, I was certain the gods had smiled upon my daring: I had stolen second.
But then she pushed me away momentarily.  I watched in dismay, morphing into disbelief, as she climbed over the seat on those bare, luscious limbs, so achingly close they brushed my cheek. She beckoned me to join her in the vast emptiness where the back seat had been removed.  In that instant, I knew one wild pitch from Caution’s pitcher and I could easily steal home.
She beckoned again.  “Mr. Livingston, come.  Why are you waiting?”
Shivering with anxiety, I suddenly realized I could score.  And yet I couldn’t pry myself from the security of second base.  Damn the baseball metaphor!  This was D-Day.  Great mother of wonders!  Finally, I was about to get laid (Ron’s language, not mine).
“But at my back . . . But at my back . . . Time’s winged chariot.”  I looked down at my watch but couldn’t see the hands in the darkness of the vehicle.  I held my arm out the window to catch the moonlight, straining to focus on the numbers of the analog face.  My God!  It was after 11:00.  The image of her father returned in my mind’s eye, sitting on the front porch just as we had left him nearly four hours earlier, awaiting our return.
It was my turn to beckon.  “Come on.  It’s late.  Your father will be worried.”
Even in the dim interior of the Jeep I discovered looks could kill . . . . Christiana gave me a scornful once over, but said nothing as she climbed back over the front seat and swiftly donned her clothes again.
Black silence once more squatted in the front seat separating us as we raced toward Hastings.  Christiana spoke only once.  “My father has a gun.”
This was news I didn’t relish hearing.  I tried to take it in the spirit in which it appeared to be delivered: a warning volley fired over the bow.  It was then that Christiana set her opening price for my woeful gambit to seize the day—£ 10.
After I refused to barter with her for my unfulfilled longing, the silence returned filling my head with shadowy scenarios that I didn’t want to imagine the ending of.  When we got to Hastings, I gingerly backed the Jeep down her street, ready for a quick getaway.  Just as I had pictured, her old man was sitting on the porch under a naked light bulb but, thankfully, with one important omission—no gun across his legs.  I jumped from the Jeep as Christiana slid down from her side.
Her father hailed our arrival.  “I was beginning to get a little worried,” he said, rising from his chair.  “You’re later than I expected.”
“My apologies,” I said seizing the opportunity to end the mendacious narrative Christiana had begun the evening with.  “I took the girls to get some ice cream after the movie.  I miscalculated the time it would take to get each of them back to their homes and then get Christiana back here.”
I glanced at Christiana, who did not return the look.   I was now grateful for her investment in the beginning of our mutually invented narrative, and relieved as she walked toward her father without a word.
I bid her father a peremptory goodnight and gunning old Silver, flew down the rutted street, keeping watch in the rear view mirror for a figure with a “gun” taking aim at the retreating vehicle.  Or would it be the single headlight of a motorcycle bearing down upon the “Peace Corpse”?
Christiana.  Now there, to my mind, was the embodiment of a “wench,” albeit a seductive one.  And the irony of that name.
What would tomorrow bring?  I cringed at the calamitous possibilities my woeful attempts to seize the day might bring.  I knew how the guilty man felt when the hangman tightened the noose about his neck.  Yet there was the heady compensation the night had brought: who among my male PC colleagues could say he had tasted the fiery mouth of lust, adrift in the mysterious darkness of Africa?

           © Gerald D. Mills, 2013