My Heart Is Like A Cabbage, Part 2 ~ Jerry Mills

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 16^th and early 17^th 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?




*                    *                    *                    *  

Chapter 13

In the days that followed, my abiding nemesis, paranoia, hunkered in the space between my ears, a vigilant, menacing presence like those vultures upon the rooftops in Freetown.  Paranoia, I was learning, was largely a symptom of guilt.  At school I watched the parking lot for the appearance of a motorcycle, its rider, Christiana’s father, his once stern but composed facial features now contorted by righteous rage.  On the school grounds I tried to avoid Christiana, ducking her gaze as she sat in my classroom, shamed by my duplicity, pretending to be her teacher while still a conscript of the desire that eclipsed all other considerations on that moon-tainted night.  Who, I wondered, had she told of our carnal intrigue?  How had the narrative of those fiery kisses been embellished for the titillation of her classmates?  I tried to keep a low profile, remaining in the lab storeroom between classes and when abroad on campus searching the faces of the students, girls and boys, for signals that betrayed this knowledge: faintly mocking smiles, presumptive glances, new levels of contempt particularly in the faces of Hannah and Joseph.

Fatamata came up to me immediately on the Monday after my “date” with Christiana.  Word that she had missed out on the trip to the Roxy had immediately gotten round to her, and she apologized profusely for having forgotten.  When would I be able to take her to the Roxy to see the movie she earned?  As I tried to be gentle but firm in delivering the news that she had missed her chance and there would not be another, I wondered how much she had heard from Christiana.  Likely not much, at least not directly, for they normally did not keep the same company.  I doubted that Fatmata’s father had a “gun” but I was going to risk any further one-on-one involvement with the young ladies in my classes.  I had learned my lesson, hadn’t I?

The gun business truly bothered me.  Normally, only hunters and the military had guns.  You couldn’t just walk into a store in Sierra Leone and buy one; even the police, following in the Scotland Yard tradition, didn’t carry side arms.  At the bungalow I lay under the mosquito netting at night watching the reflection of distant lightning flicker upon the walls, my ears attuned to the noises of the night ready to catch the guttural roar of a motorcycle climbing the hill, or the snapping twig outside the window betraying the stealth of a man bent on avenging what he believed to be his daughter’s lost honor to the red-headed Peace Corps.

Afternoons, when the scholars had finally left the school campus, I stayed till nearly dark working with Samuel to make a temporary fix on the roof over the science lab, then sometimes lent a hand with the rebuilding effort on the Form I classrooms.  As we worked side by side, I often wondered what Samuel knew of my tryst with Christiana.  

The coming of the rains and the makeshift shuffling of classrooms to compensate for the loss of one building seemed to awaken the students from the stupor of the dry season.  When all the classrooms were useable once again, I threw myself into trying to assemble a Peninsula “futbohl” team, promising to buy the players shoes if they would sincerely practice the fundamentals of teamwork.  Clifford found a manual in Freetown that outlined the rules of the game and gave some tips on offensive and defensive formations.  The field we practiced on was in horrible condition: the rains had brought on new growth of weeds, and it wasn’t level, dropping off at one end where a stream passed through the school’s property.  There were no goalposts; we used rocks to mark the mouth of each goal.  Getting the boys to stay after school for practice proved to be difficult for some had to catch lorries to Hastings, Newton and other outlying villages.  Others who resided in Waterloo had work to do after school to help earn their keep with the relatives who housed them.  

The school year was nearing an end, so to keep up their interest in the idea of a school team for the upcoming year, I promised to set up a game with another secondary school before the dismissal for the July and August break.  I contacted a fellow Volunteer in Magburaka.  He, in turn, talked with his headmaster who indicated a willingness to host a game.  Clifford promised to secure the services of a lorry and a sober driver to get the team there.  We set a date and time and on the day of the match made the nearly hour and a half drive to the Magburaka Secondary School for Boys. 

Magburaka’s team took the field, attired in school colors and football shoes.  Our boys were still in their school uniforms, all but one—Samuel—barefoot  Yet the match began well enough for Peninsula as Samuel broke away during the first few minutes of play and scored the first goal.  However, the lack of discipline of Peninsula’s players soon became evident.  Our boys failed to hold their offensive and defensive positions; like small children they ran up and down the field with no strategic designs but chasing the ball.  The final score (5 – 1) wasn’t a total humiliation but certainly didn’t boost the team’s spirits on the ride home.  Nonetheless, it was a beginning (“Rome wasn’t built in a day”—these, the words of condolence from the Magburaka Headmaster).  I felt chagrin not only in the team’s defeat but also because they had to play without shoes or uniforms.  As a reward for their first game representing our school and to build a little esprit de corps, I vowed to the team to get them all shoes and socks with Peninsula colors.

Ron began making preparations to return to the States.  The school staged a ceremony for his sendoff, and the scholars presented him with a paramount chief’s robe they had purchased with money collected for the occasion.  The effect of this magnanimous gesture and the speeches made on his behalf was caught in the glint of moisture in Ron’s eyes, something I never expected of the man who thought Waterloo needed to be reborn from its ashes.  But he knew how difficult it was for most of the scholars to come up with a contribution to purchase this fine memento of their affection.  I suspected Samuel might be the driving force behind the gift, for it was he who made the presentation, a moment of beatitude reflected in both his and Ron’s faces.  That these grateful young people had managed to set aside from their meager subsistence the money for such a gift stunned me.  It was the first time I became conscious of the awe they held us in and the impact they felt we could have on their lives.  

The Cliffords were off to England for a month of R & R.  The incident with Kei made me feel this reprieve for Malcolm had not come too soon.  Despite this bizarre episode, I had a new respect for, if not understanding of, my headmaster as I witnessed his tireless efforts to bring the school back to its normal routines.  Their Vauxhall was left in my care; I was advised to start it once a week and take it for a short spin to prevent it from seizing up during the rainy season.

Nolan was the last to desert Sierra Leone for the summer.  Phil had departed with Ron, and despite Nolan’s distaste for Phil’s habits and personality, the thought of spending nearly two months without company in the Methodist compound was more than he could bear.  Badly in need of refreshing the Western roots of his culture, he had secured tickets for a plane flight to Europe for five weeks of R & R.  He also couldn’t relinquish his fantasy about hooking up with some blonde, blue-eyed Scandinavian chick in Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands.  But travel to Europe was another Peace Corps no-no, just like having one’s own wheels, though Nolan certainly wasn’t the only Volunteer to sneak off to Europe that summer.  Travel in Africa was fine; in fact, it was encouraged though no one was allowed to go to South Africa.  Of course, you couldn’t even get a visa for South Africa in Sierra Leone in those days of apartheid.

Samuel and I continued our work on the science lab roof, attempting to make the repairs more permanent now that the school was closed.  It began raining more frequently during the daylight hours, so we often worked in light drizzle.  He informed me that he wanted to visit his mother in Bo about a week after we began our work.  It would be a short visit, no more than ten days at the most.  He also said he knew of a merchant in Bo who could give us a better price on shoes and socks than anyone in Freetown.  I gave him the money I had set aside to make the purchase without hesitation, along with the shoe sizes of the boys.  His face beaming with that endearing smile, we waved goodbye one morning as he boarded a lorry bound for Bo in front of the school compound.

Now I was truly alone.  How ironic that I say “truly,” for though still a novice in West Africa, I had already learned that loneliness is often experienced in terms relative to the speaker as was the case in my circumstance.  I did not live on a mythical desert isle; people lived within easy walking distance.  The problem was, or so I believed, they weren’t “my” people—fellow humans with familiar tastes in dress, in what they ate, in the music they enjoyed, in how they spent their pastimes and how they perceived their destinies, whose minds articulated experience in sounds that resonated with meaning in the dark passageways of the mind—people whose images would mirror the illusion that yes, here was some kind of affinity.  Troops of ladies and young girls still made their way up and down the path from Waterloo regularly to gather firewood, but their presence gave little comfort.  Their babbling, giggling, and sidelong glances were a welcome momentary reprieve from the loneliness I felt, but my discomfort in trying to communicate even in Krio only fueled my paranoia and longing.  What were they saying?  Were they laughing at me?

And so the days dragged by in self-imposed isolation.  If only Samuel would return—that would be some comfort.  As was the case with the other members of his ethnic family, Samuel and I had so little in common, yet we had shared the hours and days of nearly ten long months and so a dim design in that kinship’s tapestry had taken shape—as complicated as it was.  It seems what I feared most in that time of loneliness was losing my foothold in familiarity.

In the eighth grade, my English teacher made each of us memorize any six stanzas from Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.”  The kicker was they had to be recited before the class, this back in the day before such pedagogical tactics became considered useless, or cruel and unusual punishment.  There was magic in those rhymes and the iambic pentameter that clung to memory like an entwining vine.  I could not shake the spell of those lines through all the ensuing years of high school and even college.  One, in particular, kept coming to mind that summer of 1963:

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.”

* * * * *

It had been over two weeks and Samuel still had not returned from his visit to his mother in Bo.  I began to worry that something might have happened, but I had no idea of how to get in touch with him or his mother.  I thought of driving to Bo but where would I begin my search?  Besides, the rainy season appeared to be in full swing, the roads even more treacherous than normal, the rivers running swift and dangerously high.  I didn’t want to risk the trip alone.  Meanwhile dirty clothes had begun to pile up in the closet during Samuel’s absence.

The days I could stand, but not the evenings on the hill with no radio, no TV, no phone, nada—only the incessant, guttural hiss of the Petronax lantern.  Old Maliki still inhabited his dark lire beneath the Clifford’s house, but I saw him only once when I went up to unlock the garage and start the Vauxhall.  He spoke no English and his Krio was unintelligible.  Santigie, Omaru and Kadiatu had left for their homes when the school year ended.

At night I had visions of Christiana dressed in only that silky slip, beckoning to me from the back of the Jeep.  On afternoons when the rain hammered down in torrents on the metal roof and I could not continue my excavation of the badminton court, I tried to read.  But the minutes and hours dragged by interminably.  I would get up, walk out under the cover of the front porch peering through the rain at the path that led down to Waterloo, longing to see Christiana’s willowy figure emerging from the rain-soaked forest, vowing that I would never again refuse her favors, no matter the cost.

One day I had a visitor at the bungalow.  I was sitting on the front porch waiting for the rain to abate, when a figure partially hidden under an umbrella emerged from the path to Waterloo.  As the umbrella lifted I recognized Alimamy Sankoh, one of the Form II students at Peninsula.  Alimamy was often mistaken to be much older than his years and his demeanor accorded with that illusion.  Never one to volunteer answers to classroom questions, nonetheless, when called upon he considered the question carefully and either readily confessed he didn’t know the answer or phrased his answers tentatively.  He played on the football team, tenacious on defense, but without the élan of Samuel.  Women would never be attracted to the geometry of his physique, composed as it was of bony angles and disproportionate parts.  If Alimamy had been a tree, he would have been one of those tortured, asymmetrical shapes on the windswept slopes near mountain tree lines.   Lacking Samuel’s ready, broad smile, Alimamy’s took shape more gradually, reluctantly unveiling his crooked teeth with the slowness of rising bread.  

“Kusheh, Mr. Livingston.”

“Kusheh, Alimamy.  Ow de bodi?”

“De bodi well-o.  Tenki.”

“Come on up here on the porch . . . out of the rain.”

Alimamy thanked me politely, shaking the umbrella before mounting the steps, then placing it carefully in a corner of the porch.

“Can I offer you something to drink—some squash?”

“No sah, I am not having thirst.”

It had never been easy to draw Alimamy out, but that day I sensed more reluctance than usual.  “I haven’t seen you since school let out.  What brings you up here in all this rain?”

He looked off into the rain for a moment as if it might hold the answer he wanted.  Something was obviously troubling him.  Rows of premature wrinkles furrowed his brow as he finally, gently answered.  “Please Mr. Livingston, I am looking for work.”

“Work?”

The strain of answering this question scored his face even more.  This time I thought I witnessed a kind of embarrassment.

“Please, sah, the boys are saying Samuel is gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yes sah.  They say he will not be coming again.”

“What do you mean not coming again?  He went to Bo to visit his mother.”

“He tell the boys he will not be coming back . . . to school.  It is not good for him in Waterloo since Mr. Patterson is gone.”

I couldn’t disguise the surprise and shock at this news.  Alimamy read it in my expression immediately.

“I am so sorry, Mr. Livingston.  That is why I came to ask for work.  I am needing money for school in Form III.”

“I don’t understand how he can be gone?  I gave him £65 pounds for football shoes and socks for the team!”

It was Alimamy’s turn to be shocked.  “Lie-la,” he said under his breath.  “Mr. Livingston, I am not knowing this . . .  it . . . it cannot be a good thing.”  

I shook my head in bewilderment.  I had given nearly all the money in my savings to Samuel.  How could this be?  Could he have been so treacherous—a thief under my roof!     

“I cannot believe he has done this thing,” Alimamy said.

Nor I.  So there was no better deal in Bo for shoes and socks.  It was all a ruse to relieve me of £65.  How could I have been so stupid?  Was this payback for the day I had sent him to brush the school grounds?  Perhaps he had never really liked me: the easy smile, the deference around the house—all a front?  I thought of Pedar Knudsen and his distrust of Africans; he would not hire them to work in his house.  I had let my guard down, that old familiarity thing again . . . bought him football shoes, taught him to drive, trusted him with money . . . this was my thanks. 

I left the shelter of the porch and tramped across the wet grass separating the bungalow from the outbuilding where Samuel lived.  Alimamy followed at a respectful distance.  I had only visited that small narrow room one other time.  Now, emptied of Samuel’s woefully meager personal effects—his single white shirt and the gray shorts he wore to school each day, the Petronax burner that he boiled his rice on, the lone pot, the cheap hurricane lantern he used to study by, even his school books and the dingy pallet where he slept—it seemed even smaller.  How had he removed all of these without my knowledge?  Only a rusted machete and his homemade whisk broom lay in one corner.  A sense of betrayal clouded my mind.  Betrayal and anger.  Anger because, as I racked my mind for the causes of his behavior, I could not begin to fathom why this young man whom I had tried to befriend had decided to bite the hand that fed him.

In desperation, I stood in the doorway scanning the small, desolate room where one wall had been blackened by the cooking fires of earlier residents.  The din of the rain began to increase on the metal roof and a chill made me shiver involuntarily.  It was a bleak space for a seventeen-year-old boy to call home, measuring perhaps no more than eight by twelve feet with only one shuttered window.  No closets, no bathroom, no kitchen, not even running water.  Why had anyone gone to such trouble to enclose this ridiculously useless space with concrete blocks and a metal roof?  

In that moment, I remembered a day at the end of the previous year’s rainy season.  Ron was in Freetown and I had been off hiking on the mountain behind the D.C.’s mansion where the Cliffords lived.  I came home to find Samuel taking a bath in our bathtub, his naked black flesh laced with archipelagoes of white lather, wearing his chagrin in a rather twisted smile as I stared in shock at this impudence.

“Did Mr. Patterson say you could take a bath in our tub?”

With downcast eyes, Samuel rose from the tub.  “No sah.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Please sah, I am not having time to walk to the stream.”

“Time?  What do you mean you don’t have the time?”

He swung one leg over the edge of the tub, then fully naked looked at me, pleading with his eyes.  “Please sah.  Do not tell Mr. Patterson.  I’m sorry; I will take whatever punishment you give me.”

It was a silly thing and, yet, there it was.  I was truly surprised—no shocked—to find this African, this black young man, taking his leisure in our bathtub.  Did he also use our toilet when we were not there?  Then seeing the fear and embarrassment in his face I became aware and ashamed of the terrible but invisible burden I had brought with me from the States and which had only been reinforced by association with other whites since I had come to West Africa.  Like the Ancient Mariner whose burden was the dead albatross he had shot with his crossbow, I had carried the invisible cross about my neck that should have hung above the bathroom door—“Whites Only.”

The scrape of Alimamy’s sandals on the concrete threshold to Samuel’s former living quarters brought me back from my reverie.  “Sir?”

The boiling anger at Samuel’s treachery had percolated into confusion.  I saw what seemed to be genuine empathy in Alimamy’s face, yet the sting of betrayal, though blunted, remained.

“Let me think about the job,” I said.  “Where can I get in touch with you?”

“Yes sir,” he bowed politely.  “At the post office . . . I am telling them you will be bringing a message.”  Then he jogged off into the rain to pick up his umbrella from the bungalow’s porch. 

I looked one last time around the cell-like room, its dark shadows filled with the sketchy knowledge I had of Samuel’s daily life there.  Where did he go to the bathroom?  Where did all Africans go to the bathroom?  I remembered that walk down to the bar in Freetown nearly ten months earlier during our orientation at Fourah Bay College.  I had been in West Africa ten months and yet the daily lives of the people I had come to help remained invisible.  

I had only been in this room one other time in those ten months.  On that occasion, I had wanted Samuel to help me move the refrigerator in the kitchen.  I had called him from the bungalow, but got no response.  Thinking he might be napping, I walked over to the small yellow outbuilding.  The door was open and peeking into the dim interior, my mind quickly inventorying its furnishings.  The room, like his pallet was empty, but something caught my eye immediately that made me chuckle.  Written in chalk on a small hand-held blackboard propped up beside the pallet were the letters P-H-U-C-K.  Startled by a noise behind me, I turned to see Samuel, nearly breathless from running, smiling broadly.  

“What you be laughing at, Mr. Livingston?”

I looked in the direction of the small blackboard.  His eyes followed mine and his hand came up to cover his mouth.

He was obviously embarrassed but uncovering his mouth, he said, “I am hearing this word in English and I try to spell it.  I am thinking it may not be a good word.”  He searched my face.  “Is it bad, Mr. Livingston?”

“Well, some might say it is bad.  Headmaster Clifford, for example, or the other masters at the school.”

“And Mr. Patterson?”

“Did you hear it from Mr. Patterson?”

“Oh no sah.  I am hearing it from the Hastings and Kissy boys who attend Peninsula.  It is difficult to be a scholar when the girls at school and in Waterloo are tempting us all the time.”

I had never taken a course in anthropology in college, something I have always regretted, but I knew enough about the differences and similarities in cultures to smile inwardly at Samuel’s patriarchal assignment of guilt to women.  In its broadest outline I recognized the same lesson I had been taught by the Biblical narrative of Adam and Eve.  This, of course, was before my episode with Christiana when I, too, would lay the blame for my weakness on the fairer sex.

“How are girls tempting you?”

“Please, sah,” Samuel said, squirming under the imposed scrutiny of the question.  “Can it be good to be talking of this thing?”

“It does not hurt to only speak of it.”

I could see the reservation in his face.  Just how safe was it to speak of sex openly with a white schoolmaster?

“I will tell no one.  Whatever you tell me will be our secret.”

His eyebrows went up as he surrendered his safety to my trust.  “African boys . . . we have . . .” he hesitated, looking to me for help.  “We have—”

“—urges?” I volunteered.

He looked at me quizzically.  “Can you tell me what are these ‘urges’?”

“They are . . . .” and then I found myself groping.  “They are like needs . . . something you want . . . something your body wants—very badly, something it feels it must have.”

“Yes,” he replied, his face lighting up.  “Urges . . . they are like these urges!  They come and you are not able to be studying any longer.  It is very hard for scholars, Mr. Livingston . . . to be with these urges.”

“Don’t African boys masturbate?” I asked.

“Mas . . . ?”

“Mas—tur—bate . . . masturbation.”

“Mr. Livingston, I am not knowing all these words.”

“It is something a man can do to stop the ‘urges’ to be with women.”

He looked at me with the same wonder in his expression that I had seen on that day when he thought I might be Peninsula’s new science master.  “Can this be possible?”

“Well, of course,” I replied.  His questioned stunned me, however.  I had assumed this was a practice common to all mankind.  Was he truly ignorant of the act or only the word? 

“I have never heard of this thing.  If it can be done, it is . . . a miracle!  Girls could no longer bother us in our studies.  Will you be telling me how it is done?”

I had stepped in the cow patty again because of my assumption.  For God’s sake, I certainly couldn’t tell him how it was done.  First of all, the idea was repugnant, and if Samuel’s (and perhaps West Africa’s) ignorance was real, I didn’t want to be the one to open Pandora’s Box.

“I think you need to talk to Mr. Patterson about that,” I said.

Samuel never spoke to me again about the subject or his troubles with women.  If Ron did pass on the secrets of how a man achieves self-pleasure, I never heard of it.  If he did, perhaps he kept it to himself just as I had kept my liaison with Christiana to myself.  My motive in directing Samuel to ask Ron was the belief that the boy wouldn’t have the nerve.  Anyway, the issue or “miracle” as Samuel perceived it, if not forgotten became another of the mislaid strands in our relationship.  

As I thought of my own capitulation, my desire to renew the tryst with Christiana, I knew masturbation was no panacea for the cravings of the flesh.  Most of the young men I taught at Peninsula had made a choice: they had left the comfort and security of their homes in upcountry villages to pursue an education.  I had been so absorbed in my own loneliness I had never questioned what lay beyond Samuel’s ready smile and cocky self-confidence.   What longings had tortured him in that tiny dark cell evening after evening, week after week?

Standing there in the doorway of that nondescript outbuilding Samuel had called home for almost a year I felt for a second time something none of our mentors in our training sessions had warned us we would experience in the tropics.  Waterloo, West Africa, is located nearly 10 degrees north of the equator, about the same latitude as Panama or the Philippines—tropical by any measure.  But a burst of wind now blew the rain in horizontal sheets nearly obscuring the bungalow which stood no more than a hundred feet away.   A chill raced up my spine raising the hair on the back of my neck, the flesh on my arms erupting in tiny bumps.  

I tried to imagine Samuel’s loneliness as he stood where I now was standing.  But it was as though the rain’s fury conspired to wash away the footprint of this young man, an existence so transient it had simply vanished altogether, dissolved like minerals in the rain scoured soil.  


     *                    *                    *                    *


                      
                         Chapter 14                    

Just as the sun had desiccated the red soil for months during the dry season, so now each day the rains pounded mercilessly at the porous terrain with no reprieve.  I began to experience flu-like symptoms every two to three days—that ache-all-over feeling, headache, and general malaise.  Other than diarrhea, I hadn’t experienced any sickness during my first ten months in Sierra Leone.  But now I felt truly “sik,” the Krio cognate that sounded like “seek.”  I spent most of my days in bed, tossing in fitful sleep at night.  Each attack would begin with a chill like the one I first felt while standing at the door to Samuel’s small dwelling.  I would go to bed feeling feverish, and after some time the sweats would begin.  Then the fever would appear to leave, the wet sheets grew cool, and a chill began the cycle anew.

The Peace Corps doctor in Freetown and Carter Marshall, our Peace Corps Representative, had received new assignments.  Though Carter’s replacement had arrived, a new doctor had not yet been installed.  Perhaps the reigning wisdom was no one would get sick during the rainy season break.  Having spent a couple of days in Freetown’s Connaught Hospital earlier in the year when one of my migraines wouldn’t go away, I didn’t want to go back—not  because of my treatment there but because of what I saw, smelled, and heard.  My distrust of Waterloo institutions persuaded me not to visit the local clinic.  With no thermometer, I couldn’t even take my temperature, but the headaches, sweats, and chills told me there must be a fever.  As I ran over the many possibilities of what strange diseases might afflict humans in West Africa, I kept coming back to “malehria,” another Krio cognate.  The Peace Corps supplied us with chloroquine tablets, a popular prophylaxis for malaria.  We were instructed to take one tablet weekly.  However, strains of malaria resistant to the drug had already developed in the 1950’s.  

Remembering to take the weekly dose was another problem.  Then there had been the trip I took with Ron and four other Volunteers during the weeklong school break in mid-April.  The Loma Mountains, located in a forest reserve of eastern Sierra Leone, boasted the highest peak in West Africa west of the Cameroons, Bintumani.  Only 6,400 feet high, it didn’t pose much of a climbing challenge, yet Ron wanted another notch in his walking stick for having conquered another peak.   Getting to Bintumani posed the biggest obstacle.  First there was the long, torturous drive which seemed to take forever and ended at a remote village where we left Silver under the watchful eye (we hoped) of the local chief.  The language they spoke was incomprehensible, but a couple of the locals knew Krio and we managed to learn through much discussion and argument among the locals that they were well aware of the mountain’s existence, but how to reach it and wanting to lead us there was another matter.  

It certainly wasn’t visible from the village.  However, a government forester who just happened to be in the village at the time volunteered his services and so we set out into some of the remotest “bush” any of us had experienced.  Our guide was helpful up to a point but then lost his way, a lapse for which he was summarily dismissed by Ron the second day of our hike.  So we were on our own and got caught that afternoon in a torrential rain storm.  By continuously climbing toward higher ground and with the help of Lady Luck, we finally found our way to the base of the summit near dusk.  We spent a day on the mountain and then hiked back out in two days.  

We hadn’t reckoned with the fact that the rains began earlier at that altitude, and during that week we slept without mosquito nets and, of course, I neglected to take my weekly malaria pill.  The problem was taking a prophylaxis like chloroquine didn’t always prevent malaria anyway, though it could often delay the symptoms of the disease by weeks, even months in some instances.  

These were the many factors I weighed in making my self-diagnosis while the rain hammered on the metal roof of the bungalow each day.  I tried to eat between attacks, but often became nauseous.  Mostly I just wanted someone to take care of me, to commiserate—someone with some knowledge of my symptoms, for when it comes to illness in the tropics, ignorance has no bliss.  A reliable diagnosis would require a blood test, but each time an attack abated, I was tricked into thinking the illness had run its course.

One afternoon, as I lay tossing in bed under the fever’s influence, I heard the familiar roar of a VW’s air-cooled engine as the vehicle rounded the curve just before our driveway.  The motor shut off at the back of the bungalow.  Turning over, I tried to raise myself up enough to catch sight of the vehicle or its driver, but with no luck.  But Pedar suddenly strode into the bedroom, looking annoyingly healthy.

“What are you doing in bed?  It’s the middle of the afternoon!” he exclaimed.  I feared his intention—rousting me from the bed’s cheerless comfort.  “What’s wrong?  You don’t look good.”  

“I don’t feel so good,” I mumbled.  

“I promised Malcolm—and Birgitte—I’d look in on you on my trips to Freetown.  Looks like you’re lucky I did.  What’s the matter?”

“I dunno.”

I recounted my symptoms as best I could and my suspicions about malaria, all the while resenting his chipper mood.

“You look anemic.  Have you lost weight?”

“Probably.  Part of the time I’m nauseous.  The rest of the time I don’t feel like fixing anything to eat other than heating a can of soup.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no Peace Corps doctor right now.  The new one probably won’t be here till sometime in August.”

He rubbed his chin intently for a moment.  “Tell you what, why don’t you ride back with me to Bo?  Let Birgitte take care of you for awhile.  We’ve got a vacant bungalow next to ours where the pastor of the Bo church and his family were living.  You can stay there. Maybe we can get you to a doctor.  I have to make another trip to Freetown in a few days, so if you get better I can drive you back.”

Pedar was a man of action, forever checking his watch, a meaningless tic in West Africa.   Once he formulated a plan he wouldn’t take no for an answer.  We gathered up some of my belongings and off we went in the mud-splattered Bug.  He drove like some Southern Baptist preachers I had known in my childhood, pedal to the metal, not a prudent course of action on the rutted, muddy, rain-slick roads.  But, of course, that didn’t matter since, by Pedar’s reckoning, our fate was in God’s hands.

Even the small villages that dotted the roadway to Bo didn’t slow him down.  He took great delight in running off the dogs, chickens, and roosters foraging in the road.  Hitchhikers, too, became fair game.  Meanwhile, the Bug’s suspension system, however hardy, made for a lurching, bumpy funhouse ride that left me longing for my Waterloo bed, whatever its shortcomings.

My head ached horribly.  Conversation was the last thing I wanted, but that didn’t deter Pedar.  After running one gaunt hitchhiker off the road, he began a diatribe about the foolishness of independence for countries like Sierra Leone.  

“Sheer hypocrisy,” he said, launching his lecture, “giving independence to all of these pitiful African republics.  They don’t know the first thing about governing a country and, even if they did, where would they get the money to run their governments.  There’s no tax base, no GNP.  If it weren’t for the Syrians, Lebanese, English, and Italian business interests in Sierra Leone, their pathetic GNP would evaporate like all this rain in the dry season.  You have a handful of intellectuals who get educated in the U.S. or in London and suddenly they think they can run a country.  Then all the left wing politicians . . . what is it you call them in the U.S.?—the “bleeding hearts”—in London and Washington give their blessings and voila, independence.  All of a sudden, those black intellectuals are driving Mercedes, sipping cocktails with the Foreign Service crowd, sending their kids to European schools and keeping a white concubine in a London or Paris townhouse.  Meanwhile corruption spreads like a cancer, then a general or some other military officer stages a coup, and the people are worse off than ever.  

“The only thing African leaders are good at is pitting the Americans against the Soviets to collect foreign aid which they use to build state-controlled television stations, sports arenas, and a couple of “superhighways,” I believe you call them, in the bush near the village where they were born.  Then they auction off all the country’s natural resources to the highest bidders, and print postage stamps or fanciful currency to make a little more money on the side to buy off the military.”

Pedar looked at me momentarily for comment, maybe even a rebuttal, but I had nothing to say, except keep your eyes on the damn road, will you please.

“Justice, virtue, honesty, mercy, reason—they’re all alien to the African mind.  You give them freedom and independence, they replace it with tyranny and oppression.  They take the millions in foreign aid like candy from an uncle and stab you in the back with it,” he continued, mixing the metaphor thoroughly as he stirred the air with his index finger.

“‘None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity’—Isaiah,” he said, winking at me in the satisfaction of having called up scripture for support.

I was beginning to rue my decision to spend a week in Bo with the Knudsens no matter what creature comforts they might offer.  I closed my eyes, hoping to shutter the sight of his driving; meanwhile, he ran on and on like a radio with no on-off switch, not even a volume control.  I ransacked my mind for some pretext to hitch a ride back to Waterloo, but knew such a course of action would be foolhardy in my present state.

As we pulled into the compound of the Adventist headquarters in Bo, my desire to return to Waterloo quickly receded.  After endless miles of intractable wilderness dotted by unkempt villages, before me lay an oasis of culturally-imposed order.  It dwarfed the Methodist compound where my friend Nolan lived in Freetown.  A canopy of trees graced the winding drive that circled the premises.  Meticulously groomed flowering shrubs set off the rambling single-story residences—essentially what we would have called ranch houses in the States.  Pedar parked between the two largest dwellings on the compound.  Birgitte stood on the veranda of one, waving, drying her hands on an apron dusted with flour.  I couldn’t recall ever having seen her without an apron.

“I brought a guest,” Pedar said as he eased himself from the cramped confines of the VW.

“Well, hello, Stephen!  So good to see you.”  She flushed with embarrassment as she looked down at her apron.  “Please excuse my appearance.  I’ve been cooking.”

“Stephen’s sick, maybe malaria,” Pedar explained.  “I persuaded him your soup would make him better.”  He kissed her on the cheek.  “We can put him in the bungalow next to ours, since it’s vacant.”

“Of course,” she enthused.

“I hate to trouble you,” I said.

“Oh, no trouble . . . no trouble at all!”

Pedar raised the lid on the bonnet of the Bug and removed my bag, pointing me in the direction of the vacant house.  After a year in our cramped bungalow in Waterloo, the dwelling where I was to spend the next few days seemed ostentatiously grand.  It was one of those split floor plans, a large bedroom with bath for parents on one side of the house, a kitchen, dining and living rooms in the middle, and two smaller bedrooms with a Jack and Jill bath on the other side.  Pedar carried my bag into the large bedroom and set it down next to the bed.

“Well, what do you think?” he said, gesturing expansively at the room and its queen-sized bed.  “The dresser and closet are empty.  You can put your clothes there.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

  Pedar waved off my attempt to be grateful.  “Why don’t you get some rest?  I’m going to take a little nap myself before dinner.  The drive wore me out.”

I hesitated as I noticed there was no mosquito net over the bed.  “Do you have a mosquito net?”

He laughed then walked over to a window and pulled back the curtains.  I couldn’t remember having seen curtains on windows since coming to Sierra Leone.  “You are no doubt familiar with these in America,” he said, running a hand gently across the screen covering the window opening. 

“Wow,” I said.  “I haven’t seen screens on windows since I’ve been here.”

“We have a carpenter on the compound, part of our maintenance crew,” he said proudly.  “Clever fellow, for an African at least.  It took some doing because of the mechanism for opening and shutting the windows, and getting screen wire was another problem.  We had to import it.  See how it works,” he said, cranking the window open.  “We’ll let the room air out a little.”

“My father was a carpenter.  It looks like something he made for a cabin he built in Missouri,” I said, examining the work.

“Well, I admire people like your father—clever with their hands . . . something I’ve never been,” he said, letting the curtain fall back. “Tell you what.  You get some rest and I’ll send one of the boys over to wake you when dinner is ready.”  He grinned, then turned abruptly and without further ado left me standing there beside the open window.

I scanned the room. noting its homey touches: the curtains, the quilted bedspread, the doilies on the dresser and bed stands, the throw rugs on the floor.  As I stretched out on top of the quilt and stared at the ceiling, I realized I hadn’t enjoyed this kind of creature comfort since I had left the States.  The mattress I lay on was incredible and, before long, the room began to dispel the lingering depression my sickness had brought with it.

Lying there I began to think of Samuel—his entire living quarters no more than a third the size of just this bedroom.  Somewhere out there amidst the congested anonymity of Bo was Samuel with my £65.  For some reason I couldn’t hold on to the anger and sense of betrayal I had felt.  I wondered if I might bump into him by chance while in Bo.  

What had he done with the money?  Squandered it on the prized “bling” of trinkets, watches, necklaces, a radio, or shiny black dress shoes?  Or had he given it to his mother along with some fabricated explanation that here was a gift from his Peace Corps benefactors?  I remembered the brown and black striped blanket he had come to me with after returning from a trip to Bo.  He told me his mother had made it, beaming with pride at the heavy cotton country cloth made up of long five-inch-wide strips.  His mother had done all the work: the spinning, the dyeing.  The strips, he explained, were first woven on a small hand loom, then stitched side-by-side to create the width of a blanket.  He laid it in my arms—a gift. 

Drifting into a restless sleep while lying on top of the quilt, I dreamed of various solutions to the problem of fitting screens on the windows of the bungalow in Waterloo.  Minutes later, I awoke suddenly to find one of the Knudsen boys staring down at me with a degree of fascination on his face that made me wonder if I had been talking or gesturing in my sleep.

“Papa sent me to wake you,” he said, and before I could respond, ran from the room.

Birgitte’s chicken-free chicken soup lived up to Pedar’s endorsement.  She also served a medicinal herbal tea.  After dinner she pressed upon me a whistling teakettle to heat water, plus a supply of teabags.  She insisted I would feel better in the morning if I made myself another cup before retiring for the night.

It was already dark when I bid the Knudsens goodnight and returned to the vacant dwelling.  Ah, the luxury of electricity and light switches.  I filled the teapot with water —another luxury, for the water didn’t have to be boiled and filtered since the compound had its own safe water supply—and set it on the stove to heat.  It was only 9:00.  Since I knew it would take some time for the water to boil and felt assured the pot’s whistling would alert me, I made my way to the bedroom.  Retrieving from my bag the 1959 edition of Cry, the Beloved Country Ron had left behind, I lay back on top of the bed again and there, bathed in the miracle of noiseless, incandescent light began reading Paton’s brief first chapter.  I distinctly remember the salutation to one of the letters in chapter two—“My Dear Brother in Christ.”  Then, sometime shortly after that, my own interior lights went out. 

I awoke confused, unable to recognize my surroundings, lights still blazing, the book lying face down on my chest.  On a nightstand next to the bed, the little hand of a clock pointed to 2, the minute hand to 9.  Still disoriented, I got up, went over to the window and pulled the curtain back.  It was pitch dark outside, except for the feeble glow of two security lights.  Slowly my memory began to piece together the puzzle of my surroundings.  I belched, the juices from my stomach bearing the memory of dinner and Birgitte’s herb tea—oh my God!

Forgetting there were electric lights, I stumbled toward the dark kitchen.  It was bathed in an eerie red glow coming from the stove.  Flipping on the lights I gasped at what I saw: the bottom of the teakettle had melted and become fused with the burner of the stove.  Evidently when the water had all boiled away, the physics of heat had set to work on the metal.  My God, there could have been a fire!   Switching off the burner I kept turning over in my mind various explanations that might answer the Knudsen’s obvious question: Why hadn’t the teakettle’s whistle awakened me?  My “malehria” was the only answer that made sense.  The answer nearly satisfied me.

The stovetop hadn’t been damaged, but those fused remains of the kettle with the burner were an ugly reminder of what could have been a disaster.  Nothing could be done at this point for the evidence of my appalling negligence was too hot to touch.  The threat of fire had passed, so I wandered back to the bedroom, shaking my head about the prospects of facing the Knudsens, especially Birgitte, and silently cursing the star-crossed luck that seemed to dog my existence in Sierra Leone.  I had repaid their hospitality with yet another example that I couldn’t be trusted with responsibility.

Sleep came in short intervals the remainder of that night.  I had jumped from the frying pan of malarial fevers into the fire of chagrin.  The disaster in the kitchen haunted me through my looping dreams.  Just after daylight, the sound of Pedar’s VW backing out onto the main compound drive startled me.  Though still fascinated by the convenience of light switches, I figured I had already wasted enough electricity and decided to dress by nature’s own light.  Making my way to the kitchen, I wrestled with the prospect of how to save face.  The burner and remains of the teapot had cooled and I was able to separate most of the pot’s remains from the burner.  But there was no covering up all of the evidence of the deed: some of the melted remnants of the pot’s bottom appeared to be permanently fused to the burner.   Perhaps if it was heated again, that might solve the problem, I reasoned.

Behind me I heard a knock at the back screen door and it opened as I turned.  

“Stephen, I didn’t know if you’d be up so early,” Birgitte said brightly.  “I made Pedar and the boys some breakfast.  What can I fix for you?”

I was blocking her view of the stove, so she didn’t immediately see the damage.  She had a different apron on.

“I’m afraid I’ve done something stupid,” I said, standing to one side and gesturing at the stove.  “I’ve ruined your teakettle . . . maybe even the stove.  I’m so sorry.”  

Her hand came up to her mouth involuntarily as she walked over to inspect the damage.

“Goodness gracious!  What happened?”

Up till that moment, my mom was the only one I had ever heard use the alliterative G exclamation.  “I must have fallen asleep last night—reading in bed—waiting for the kettle to whistle so I could drink the tea you gave me.  The water boiled away, I guess, and then the burner melted the kettle.”

She inspected the surface of the stove.  “Well there’s no damage to the stove’s surface.  The burner can be replaced,” she said gingerly pulling up and out on the burner and holding it up for inspection.  “There,” she said. “You see?  Pedar can order a new one.”

She smiled.  “As for the teakettle, it was an old one.  It won’t be missed.  I have another in my kitchen.” 

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.  “You must think me irresponsible.  I want to pay for the damage.”

“Don’t be silly.  Pedar will bill the mission for the burner.  It’s a trifle.”

“But I feel responsible.  You’ve invited me here . . . extended your hospitality, and I’ve made a mess.”

“It was an accident; you haven’t been feeling well.  Pedar invited you here to help you get better.  Which reminds me, did you take your malaria medicine yesterday?”

“Yes . . . at least I remembered that.”

“Come.  Let me fix you something for breakfast.”

“I’m not really very hungry.”

“Nonsense, you must eat.  I’ll make you some tea.  How about a poached egg on toast and some fresh fruit?”

It was clear that, like Pedar, she wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so I gave in.  As I sat at the breakfast table, I could see she had already been busy preparing another meal.

“Excuse my mess,” she said.  “Pedar and the boys are always hungry.”

“Where are the boys?”

“They went with their father to visit the leper colony in Masanga.”

“Leper colony?”

I could see the hesitancy in her demeanor.  “Yes, Pedar is negotiating with the authorities to allow our mission to take over the administration of the facility.  To be truthful, I’m a little anxious about the boys, but he promised they would be alright.  You probably know Pedar by now.”

She brought the cup of tea to the table but, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, seemed disconcerted.  She finally spoke again while slicing fruit at the sink.  “Pedar told me the boy who worked for you—what’s his name?”

“Samuel?”

“Yes, Samuel.  Pedar said he stole from you.”

“I gave him money a few weeks ago to buy shoes and socks for the Peninsula football team we’re trying to start up.  I haven’t seen or heard from him since then.”  

“But your own money?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.”

  “Why would you do that?”

“Well, at the time I trusted him.  He had been with Ron for nearly a year before I came, and worked another year for the two of us.”

“No.  I meant why would you buy shoes and socks for the boys at school with your own money?”  She set a dish of sliced mangoes and bananas in front of me.  “Couldn’t the Peace Corps pay for them?”

“I doubt it, but I really don’t know.  I never thought to ask.”

She began poaching the egg at the stove.  “I’m afraid Pedar thinks you’re a bit naïve about Africans.  To him they’re all like small children—so little concept of right and wrong, and they have so little ambition.”

“I think they know right from wrong, but some of them choose to do wrong just like some of us.”

“Malcolm told us about all of the things you’ve done for the school: the benches in the science lab, the repairs on the roof, the football team, teaching science at the school.” 

“Actually, I didn’t build the benches.  I just put seats on them and, as it turns out, that wasn’t such a great idea.”

She refilled my teacup.  “You’re too modest.  You may be underestimating the value of your contributions.  Just because what you do doesn’t always work out as you had planned is no reason to blame yourself.  What’s important is your heart is in the right place.” 

I looked up at her wondering what she would think of my contributions to the school if she knew about my fling with Christiana.  Placing the poached egg before me, she took a seat at the table and blew across the top of a cup of tea she had poured for herself.

“Are you a Christian?” she asked, then immediately apologized for her lack of discretion when she saw my hesitation.

“It’s okay.  I’m just not sure how to answer that question.  I supposedly became a Christian . . . I was baptized . . . when I was nine.  But so much has happened since then—especially in college.  It seems like a lifetime ago.”

She smiled.  “But such a short lifetime.”

It was my turn to smile.  “I guess I’m what you might call an agnostic.  I hope that word doesn’t shock you.  I know there are some Christians who think agnostics are worse than atheists.”  

“Agnostic?  I’m not familiar with the word—Pedar is always making fun of me  . . . of my English, my education.  I’m afraid I’m just a stupid housewife.”

I wanted to assure her she was not just a stupid housewife but thought it best not to go there.  “Basically it means I’ve come to the conclusion that man’s explanations in his religions of the universe’s mysteries leave me with too many unanswered questions.  Agnostic is simply a way of saying I don’t know the answers—unlike atheists who simply dismiss the notion that there is a God.”

“So why do you and so many other young Americans join the Peace Corps?  Why do you leave the comforts of home to come to places like West Africa?  Aren’t there jobs with better money in the States?  I know they don’t pay you so well.  But why would you want to help these poor, miserable people anyway? ”

  So many questions, all of which I had heard before and yet never had the right answer.  I had tried various strategies for answering them: in the presence of Christians, the short answer was I wanted to be a missionary as a young boy.  It contained an element of truth but was, nonetheless, lame.  When I wanted to downplay any altruism on my part, I would speak of the military draft and the lousy job prospects given my liberal arts degree.

Yet something about the moment and the question coming from her made me want to be honest—with her as well as myself.  I thought I had a sense that she wasn’t asking me these questions so much as she was asking herself, or asking for herself.

“I always have a hard time with these kinds of questions.  I’m afraid there are many reasons: the adventure, the attention received back in the States for being selected to become a member of the Peace Corps.  Some people don’t realize that even though I have a college degree, it probably wouldn’t have kept me from being drafted into the army.  The idea of doing something for my country other than being in the military appealed to me.  I knew from being in advanced ROTC (that’s an officer training adjunct of American colleges that allows you to enter the military as an officer when you graduate) I would be miserable in the military.  So I dropped out of the program in my senior year.”

“Does the Peace Corps exempt you from military service?”

“Only for the two years I’m in Sierra Leone.  I don’t know what will happen when I get back.”  I smiled.  “I’ve heard marriage is the only thing that will lower your chances of getting drafted.”

“So you serve here two years, but you may have to serve again in the military when you return?”

I shrugged.  “That’s my understanding—a temporary stay of execution, as they say.”

She shook her head, staring into her tea as if reading leaves.  “We came here, Pedar and I, with the boys, to do God’s work.  But I don’t know . . . sometimes it is hard, you know?”  She looked at me as if I might have misunderstood.  

“I don’t mean the living is hard; we have everything we need here.  We live better than we did back in Denmark,” she said with a forced smile as she surveyed the kitchen.  “But it is difficult—being away from family and friends, people close to you, people you trust.  There are so few people here I can take into confidence.  

“Pedar puts on a brave face, but I know he feels the same way deep inside.  Africa is changing him.  It’s not what we expected.  He won’t admit it, but I see it every day.  Oh, he’s always been temperamental; he’s a perfectionist, you know.  But he flies into rages with the Africans all the time; he doesn’t trust them or respect their ways—he’s always berating the help here on the compound and even the African preachers and deacons in the outlying churches.  He thinks they’re lazy.”

Her eyes had grown moist.  “It’s so strange here.  I think about home all the time.  The church would let us go back like the Cliffords did this summer . . . funny, I still call it summer, when it’s always summer here.  

“Pedar’s always been ambitious; he sees his future in the church and feels it will be seen as a weakness if he goes back.  He tells me to take the kids and go, but I can’t.  I’m afraid to leave him here by himself.”

I could sense that she felt my discomfort at hearing all of this.  It was difficult to imagine why she had chosen me to open up to.  And I?  I was supremely flattered, for here was a married woman whom I barely knew, probably fifteen years my senior, who had lived in Sierra Leone longer than I, baring her troubled heart and, in so doing, echoing some of my own misgivings about our separate but similar roles in West Africa.

“I watch you young Americans, many like you I’m sure are ag . . . what did you call         yourself?”

“Agnostic.”

  “I’m certain some may even be atheists . . .  helping these people, learning their ways, their languages.  This place is so beautiful and we have everything we need.  Yet I feel so isolated.  I was much more comfortable in Freetown—the stores there, and people you could talk to.  You know we’ve never learned the Mende language; I don’t even know Krio.  Pedar knows a little so he can communicate with the workers, but that’s all.  

“I don’t like going to the public market: it’s so filthy, people shouting, bartering—it’s all so alien.  They always want money or favors from us.  I feel guilty turning them down because they have so little.  Pedar simply dismisses them—lecturing them on hard work, ambition, honesty, abstinence.  He believes it’s God’s will we are here.”

I began to understand how she was able to be so dismissive of the teakettle incident.  She was more deeply troubled by the same things that often troubled me, but for her the consequences were more damaging.  The collision of cultures had taken a greater toll, perhaps because she had been brought up to believe that what she and Pedar carried to West Africa were the ethics of not only a superior culture but one imbued with the notion that it alone could save their immortal souls, and that both were gifts that would improve the quality of African lives.  Unfortunately, older Africans seemed to stubbornly resist both, or they acquiesced simply to gain favor with Europeans and Americans.

“I get the same feeling sometimes,” I said, though I wasn’t really sure if it was the same.  I thought it best to break off the conversation, telling her I felt like a walk around the compound.  She was embarrassed, apologizing again. 

“It’s me that should be apologizing for ruining your teakettle and damaging the stove.”  Again, she waved this off dismissively.

“Take this back with you,” she said, handing me a larger blue tea kettle with a thick aluminum base.  “It heats faster.  It’s my favorite.  I don’t think you’ll melt it,” she said, tapping the base.

Pedar and the boys returned late that evening, so we had a late dinner.  The trip seemed to have energized him and it was clear he craved an audience to talk about the facilities and situation at Masanga and the doctor who lived there with his wife and two small children.  The salient point of his narrative?  Masanga was ripe for the picking: the doctor was pleasant, more than competent.  They were Americans, but obviously they needed not only more money to run the place but someone to manage it properly.  He was going to send a telegram to his superiors in Berne the next day and follow up with a letter to the Adventist headquarters in Washington, D.C.  Obviously, he felt that bringing the leper colony under Adventist control would be an impressive coup.

I saw Birgitte only briefly at breakfast and dinner the next day.  She was off with the boys to visit a church member in Bo.  She handed me a bag before leaving—my lunch.   I sensed a reticence, in my mind a sign of her embarrassment at having opened up to me for those brief moments the day before.  Most of that day I spent reading, nearly finishing Paton’s poignant story which he had written in those days before white men would implement apartheid as the solution to South Africa’s racial strife.  It is a tale not only about the clash of cultures but the tragic legacy of white supremacy in Africa.  

As I took my daily turn around the compound that afternoon, discretely observing the half dozen or so workers dutifully tending the grounds, hailing me politely as “masa,” I recalled the Zulu “inkosi”—chief or master.  Watching them work, I began to wonder what narratives of their sentient lives lay sealed from my understanding by the language, race, and class barriers that separated us.  

That night the Knudsens and I dined one last time on leftover sans chicken chicken soup.  I felt much better physically, but my spirit had been dampened by the thoughts running through my mind.  You cannot read Paton’s novel without being touched by his love for South Africa.  It is as though the land and its people exist in stark relief in the landscape of his words—those searing descriptive passages that carry the weight of his nostalgia for a land’s soul and the souls of the people who inhabit it, words that carry an ache no less freighted with the burden of memory than Isak Dinesen’s simple beginning to Out of Africa—“I had a farm in Africa.”

That night, having set the second kettle Birgitte had given me on the remaining burner at the front of the stove to boil water for tea, I lay back on top of the bed again, determined to finish Cry, the Beloved Country.  I awoke the next morning at dawn’s first light, momentarily refreshed from the first full night’s sleep I had had in weeks.  But the lights were still on; the book, as it had two nights before, lay open on my chest.  Déjà vu!  Dread flashed through me in its electric arc.  

“No!  No!” I cried into the resounding stillness of the house.  “Jesus, not again!” I screamed, rolling off the bed feet first.  I ran to the kitchen, heart pounding, legs pumping like pistons of jelly, my brain dithering between wishful miracle and predictable consequence, hoping somehow that what I feared most in those moments couldn’t actually have happened.  But it had: the burner still glowed in the dimly lit kitchen illuminating a slag-like puddle of silvery metal which had spread across the margin of the stovetop, then spilled like frozen water down the gleaming white oven door.  

* * * *

Chapter 15

I had parted company with the Knudsens on fairly good terms.  They tried to assure me the damage to the stove was cosmetic and wouldn’t interfere with its function, and the teakettles replaceable.  They did seem less enthusiastic about my visit, however, than upon my arrival.  Still, on our way back to Waterloo, Pedar took a side excursion to show me the Masanga facility.  On the washboard road, he had one of those “white” moments when we came across a group of men trying to remove the remains of a large tree that had fallen across the road.  At first he simply played annoying little ditties on the VW horn which had the fleeting effect of spurring on the workers.  But as the minutes wore on, he became increasingly testy, drumming on the steering wheel with his fists, checking his watch and yelling at the men to hurry.  After fifteen minutes, he could stand it no longer and jumped from the car, grabbed an ax from the hands of the nearest worker and began hacking maniacally at the tree for perhaps a span of three minutes.  Thereupon, he handed the ax back to the worker and returned to the car sweating, out of breath, shaking his head at the workers in reproach.

The area around Masanga during the rainy season is lush and beautiful.  A river flows nearby, brownish-red in the rainy season, a bracken green, I was told, when the rains abated.  The colony, founded in 1948, served principally as a refuge for leprosy patients who had been ostracized from their villages.  The doctor Pedar had spoken of was as handsome as his wife was beautiful.  The couple, in their early thirties, had two cherubic, rambunctious children, a boy and a girl.  From my perspective, the family was completely at ease in this idyllic setting, as if living in the midst of a community whose residents were victims of one of the world’s most feared diseases was nothing out of the ordinary.  But in the presence of Pedar, they were clearly on their guard.  The doctor offered a tour of the facility for my benefit, and I tried as best I could to embrace the opportunity, but the sights and smells of a leper colony are not for the faint of heart, and I felt what little vigor I had regained while in Bo leak away as he led us around the grounds. 

Hansen’s Disease, as it is known professionally, manifests its carnage on the body in a host of ways.  I had witnessed its ravages on the beggar who intimidated customers at the entrance to the Kingsway department store in Freetown: his fingers, toes, even the lower extremities of the legs all gone as though amputated.  These were the lasting hallmarks of leprosy even in remission.  But at Masanga I saw horrible disfigurements of the face, noses eaten away, nodules of facial flesh rising like bubbles on baking dough; stumps of hands and feet charred to the blackness and texture of charcoal.  Some have said the smell is sickly sweet, an oxymoron which has little meaning for me; others have pronounced it fetid, which says only that the smell is offensive; others have proclaimed it like the scent of rancid butter, of which I have no knowledge.  I have no words to describe the smell, but it is insinuatingly nauseating and takes the nose prisoner, clinging there in the dark cavities of the sinuses as if affixed by invisible barbs. 

Masanga had been a place apart since its founding, an island of humanity whose residents had suffered more from loss of self-esteem and isolation than from pain or disability.  And in the midst of all this horror, which definitively called into question the existence of a just and loving God, lived this beautiful family of four—the handsome doctor, his lovely wife, and their adorable children, existing with a nonchalance I could not comprehend, all while tending to the needs of this community in exile as if it were, unquestionably, a lost paradise. 

That night, under the familiar veil of the mosquito net over my bed in Waterloo,  I replayed the memory of that brief visit to Masanga.  The elixir of that couple’s undaunted compassion was bitter-sweet-- “bitter” because it reminded me of how short I had fallen of the standard they set in providing for the needs and comfort of others.  I could only rationalize that none of the foreigners I had rubbed shoulders with since coming to Sierra Leone had demonstrated this degree of empathy for those less fortunate than themselves.  “Sweet” because their example provided a living example that the human heart is completely unpredictable in its capacity to love.

* * * * *

It stood tall, boxy, slightly imposing and somewhat improbable, flanked by one-story structures on each side--a wood dwelling on the left weathered nearly black; on the right a recently painted business establishment.  Syrian and Lebanese shopkeepers built this kind of three-story citadel along Freetown’s busiest streets, a reminder of the lingering tensions between themselves and the African population of Freetown.  The top two floors, bordered on three sides by balconies, became the shop owner’s living quarters.  The ground floor, typically given over to retail sales of one sort or other by day, had four street-side entries which remained open during business hours but were barricaded by steel roll-up doors at night or, as was the case in 1955, whenever simmering resentment boiled over into the city’s streets.  

After two years of petitioning by Sierra Leone Volunteers, the Peace Corps had leased this particular structure and converted it to a rest house for Volunteers who came to Freetown to shop and to play at the nearby beaches.  During the building’s renovations, the doors facing the street were permanently shuttered.  A little walled courtyard built on the right hand side of the structure enclosed the lone side entrance.  In bright sunlight the once-white structure had a faint yellow tint; on overcast days, like the one on my first stay, the walls turned dun, streaked like most of Freetown’s concrete structures by mildew, especially along the edges of the balconies where it resembled mascara runs.  Though not wholly inviting, it fit the needs of upcountry Volunteers who, when they descended on Freetown, had been forced in the past to presume on the hospitality of their fellows who lived and worked there.

Ordinarily I would have stayed at Nolan’s place, but he still hadn’t returned from Europe.  One weekend in August, I decided to give the rest house a try.  The symptoms of the sickness that had dogged me were largely gone.  Perhaps Birgitte’s soup had worked its wonders, but the memory still stung of those melted teakettles at the Adventist compound.  Now, however, an advanced case of loneliness coupled with “cabin fever” had turned the Waterloo bungalow and its encroaching canopy of green into a prison.

I overslept my first morning at the rest house.  The sky was overcast, the air thick with the promise of rain.  I awoke in the windowless room I had been assigned with a stiff neck and headache.  The hallway echoed of emptiness as I padded barefoot down to the bathroom.  The rainy season wasn’t the best of times for R & R in Freetown, since the unpredictable condition of the upcountry roads made travel dicey.  The beaches, also, had lost much of their allure due to the rain and cool ocean breezes.  Returning from the bathroom I ran into Harlan James, a fellow Volunteer with whom I had traded battle stories the previous evening.   Harlan had ventured down from Port Loko—Temne country in northwest Sierra Leone.  We hadn’t seen one another since our brief orientation nearly a year earlier at Fourah Bay College.   

35 mm camera in hand, Harlan was headed for the third floor balcony at the other end of the hall to snap some pictures of Freetown street life.  With nothing else to do, I followed him onto the balcony where we watched the flow of traffic—the double-decker buses, cabs, lorries and assorted private passenger cars passing beneath us.  The foot traffic interested Harlan most, especially the ladies sauntering rhythmically along the sidewalks with loads of produce, laundry, water, and assortments of retail items balanced on their heads.

A volley of vehicle horns caught our attention.  We both looked in the direction of the noise and watched a small knot of pedestrians, oblivious to the traffic they were blocking, make their way down the street in our direction.  In the center of the group a curious looking creature was dancing and gesturing at passing cars and pedestrians.  Harlan squinted, then raised the camera to his eye.  

“Poro devil,” he said with excitement and began snapping pictures in earnest.  

The Poro is a secret fraternal society in Sierra Leone, responsible for preparing young boys to become men—the so-called rite of passage.  The Bundu Society serves a similar purpose for young women.  Still powerful in what was once the protectorate area of Sierra Leone, it was an active force in regulating the sexual, social, and political lives of several tribes.  Upcountry, young men are not considered mature enough to marry or even have intercourse until they have been initiated. 

The Poro devil in his fearsome costume is the focal fetish of this ritual, and his identity is a closely guarded secret.  During the dry season, those young men in a village ready for initiation are figuratively “swallowed” by the devil—in other words, carried off to a secret, off limits location in the bush where their education begins.  All this may sound terribly primitive to some, but there are parallels in Western culture such as the rites and secrets of Freemasonry.

Once the initiation into the Poro society has been completed as the rainy season sets in, the initiate is paraded before the village in the company of the devil and his entourage, looking for gifts and donations.  It was Harlan’s guess that we were witnessing this last stage of the Poro initiation.  The Poro Societies no longer had as much clout in the social environment of a large urban area like Freetown.  Yet because of the pockets of upcountry settlers who had migrated to the city seeking employment, many vestiges of tribal culture, especially a powerful force like the Poro, often remained intact.  

Often these groups attracted jobless hooligans, drunk on palm wine and ready to raise a little hell to reassert the authority of the Poro.  This seemed to be the case in the group we watched approaching the rest house.  They brandished sticks, clubs, and a machete or two at passing pedestrians and vehicles.  Harlan kept snapping pictures as they approached, despite my warnings.  Many of these groups still believed cameras had the power to reveal the devil’s identity, a closely guarded secret that insured its power and authority.

A member of the devil’s entourage suddenly spotted Harlan and, waving his stick in our direction, drew the attention of the others.  The entire group began shouting, gesturing up at us, their faces distorted with menacing rage.  

“Let’s get out of here,” I yelled at Harlan as the gang rushed the rest house.  

“It’s a public street,” he said.  “They can’t stop us from taking pictures.”

Unsure of their exact intentions, it was clear to me there was blood in their eyes.  Who knew what they might do and whether public vs. private displays had any meaning to them?  In no time they had discovered the courtyard entrance and occupied the building, yelling at occupants and terrorizing the Africans hired by the Corps to service the building.  I didn’t know where to hide, but I sure as hell didn’t want to confront them on that balcony if and when they made their way to the third floor.

I ducked back into the hallway, greeted by the clamor coming from the ground floor where they were ransacking the sitting room and dining area.  Harlan refused to follow, standing his ground on the balcony.  As I fled down the hall, I heard cries of vengeance and the rumble of heavy footfalls resounding up the stairwell.  There was no time to be picky about a hiding place.  I slipped into the open doorway of a sleeping room and shut the door.  The room had no closet, no furniture other than two beds, so I rolled under one just as I heard the first wave of the group storming down the hall toward the balcony.

Realizing the absurdity and patent cowardice in my choice of a hiding place, I squirmed back out, hunkering momentarily alongside the bed, brushing the dust bunnies off my clothes.  The attackers were screaming on the balcony, and I fully expected either they would throw Harlan over the edge or beat him senseless if he didn’t surrender the camera.  Overloaded with adrenaline, I was shaking as I opened the door a crack to peek down the hall.  I could barely catch sight of Harlan, using all of his six-foot plus frame to hold the camera out of their reach.  The scene resembled some unfortunate prey treed by a pack of crazed, barking hounds.  Unfortunately, Harlan was the tree.

I watched as he opened the back of the camera, pulled out the curling roll of film and handed it to the fellow who was insistently in his face.  The group conversed among themselves for a moment then, surprisingly, beat a noisy retreat in my direction.  I closed the door soundlessly, hoping I hadn’t been spotted and that they were satisfied with Harlan’s surrender of the film.  When the sound of their voices and drumming footsteps faded, I went to the bed and sat on its edge, still shaking.

There had been a point in this incident when I was certain either my life might end or I, too, would be beaten to a bloody pulp.  In all my life I have never been in the grip of such primal fear.  But what bothered me most was the knowledge that I would have to live with the shame of this moment of truth.  As my early Bible studies had taught me, I had been weighed in the balance and found wanting—I hadn’t Harlan’s courage.  I was a coward who had retreated into hiding, leaving him to face the music alone.  

Remarkably, both he and the camera escaped from the incident unscathed.  Only the film was lost.  By the time the police arrived, the devil and his henchmen had vanished and, to my knowledge, were never caught.  But for me, the episode left a lasting image.  In the bubble that had been my past, the latent savagery of mankind had been white-washed with codes of civility; for the most part only men who went to war and the victims of heinous criminals like serial killers and rapists had seen the face of the animal that sleeps within our humanity.  Little did I know then I would meet that face again before I left Sierra Leone. 




     *                    *                    *                    *

Chapter 16

I had been spoiled by Samuel—the chores he had done needed attention, especially my clothes.  I tried washing them in the bathtub as I had seen him do when the stream in the woods ran dry, but without a washboard it proved hopeless.  I didn’t relish the task of beating and kneading them on stones, so, abetted by the dampness of the rainy season, they lay in the dank closet becoming funkier each day.  Growing anxious, I left word at the Post Office for Alimamy and hired him the very day he next visited me.  The incident at the rest house made me more wary about relationships with Africans, but sometimes one must trust the gut and Alimamy, though more diffident than most of the boys at school, had the bearing of  someone worthy of that trust.  

We went to work immediately trying to get the football field in shape.  Clifford had purchased threaded four inch pipes to be used as goalposts.  We assembled these, dug holes and cemented them into the ground at each end of the field, then painted them white.  I rigged up a drag which we weighted down with heavy rocks. Alimamy rode the makeshift apparatus while I towed it behind the Jeep trying to both uproot and/or knock down the weeds and make a stab at leveling the field.  Working with Alimamy proved an entirely different experience than working with Samuel: he never presumed on our relationship, pushing to make it personal, and he undertook each task, not with Samuel’s alacrity, but with studied resolve.

Nolan had sent an aerogramme from Tangiers saying that he would be back in Sierra Leone the last week of August.  So on the evening of the day after he was to arrive, I drove to Freetown once again.  I found him in the process of completing a move from his former dwelling to a larger one on the compound.  Back only two days, his spirits had already sunk to a new low.  The principal at Methodist Boy’s School and the new Peace Corps Rep had informed him that two new Volunteers would be added to the staff and both would be his roommates—“Complete strangers!” Nolan exclaimed.  So it became necessary to move to a larger dwelling on the compound.  To drive away depression, he continued basking in the still untarnished memory of Copenhagen’s delights, especially Danish blondes.  The French, he informed me, had as little dignity about where they urinated as Africans.  And guess who he had accidentally run into in Tangiers?  Phil, his former roommate.  Phil was shacked up with a femme fatale, delivered to his arms cum laude from the University of Alaska, her papa footing the expenses of a daughter’s wanderlust.  Tangiers swung like a pendulum and afforded the gustatory delights of ice cream—Howard Johnson’s ice cream!  

Nolan had managed to smuggle bourbon into Sierra Leone via two White-Rain shampoo bottles—potently precious Kentucky wonder.  So that evening, having settled into the new dwelling, we drank to the lovely women of Copenhagen, to the 28 flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and to the ever-so-slim hope of witty, urbane, classical-music-loving roommates for the coming year.  

Three Peace Corps ladies, whom Nolan visited frequently, lived together in a house within walking distance of the Methodist compound.  Nolan had had a history with one of them since our days in training at New Paltz.  Sharon was her name.  It was dusk when, having finished off half a White Rain bottle of bourbon and thoroughly depressed by Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, we succumbed to the tide of longing for female companionship.

Fueled by 90 proof camaraderie, we jogged in the road toward Sharon’s apartment—I, clad only in my boxer underpants and Nolan, naked from the waist up.  How I came to be in that near state of nature remains a mystery.  Inexplicably, the closer we got to our destination the more urgent our desire for the company of females became.

“Sharon!” Nolan began yelling.  “Sharon!”

“Sharon!” I echoed as he paused to get his breath.

“Sharon!  Sharon!” we chorused.   

The lights of a vehicle coming up behind us illuminated the road.  Rather than speed up to go around, it began to slow down.  Slightly in the lead, I slipped over in front of Nolan, who turned to look back.

“Aw shit,” he muttered just loud enough that I could hear.  “Cops.”

I turned, shading my eyes from the headlights.  Even in their glare and the darkening twilight I could make out the tell-tale navy blue and gray colors of the Land Rover.  It was, indeed, the Freetown police, and they pulled alongside us as we slowed to a walk.

“Gentlemen, what are you about?” the officer on the passenger side asked, his eyes running over our attire, or lack thereof.

“We’re on our way to visit a friend,” Nolan answered, stopping.  “She lives there,” he pointed to the building just a few doors away.

“Is it your custom to make visits to women dressed like this?”

“Well, it’s very hot tonight, officer—humid . . . very humid,” Nolan said, fanning himself with his hand.

“Do you mind if we accompany you to this . . . this friend’s place?” the driver asked with feigned politeness.

“Not at all,” Noland said.

With the Land Rover at our heels, we began jogging again, but as we neared the building, they sped up and stopped.  The officer on the passenger side jumped out and motioned for us to halt.  

Much like Nolan’s place, the girls’ living quarters were situated on the second floor, the first floor housing a garage used for storage.  The officer who had spoken to us mounted the stairs and knocked.  Sharon came to the door and out on the small veranda, peering down at us with a look of surprise.  They conversed for a few minutes, then he came back down the stairs, motioning to his partner to release us.

Grateful to be rescued, the two of us climbed the stairs while Sharon waved farewell to the officers as they climbed back into their Land Rover and drove away.

“What on earth were you two doing?”  Her eyes ran over our attire with undisguised scorn.

“We came see you,” Nolan said.

“You nearly got yourselves arrested.  What’s with the dress code?”

“It’s hot,” we said simultaneously, following her into the apartment.   

“What have you been drinking?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“I can smell it, first of all, and so could the cops.  Your attire also kind of gives it away.  And when have the two of you ever come jogging over here?”

“What did you say to the cop?” Nolan asked.

“Nothing much.  I assured him I knew you two and you were harmless.  I told a little white lie—that you often run over here to visit.  He said you were yelling. What were you yelling?”

“Your name,” I said.

“In vain?  Or should I not ask?” 

“Where are Kim and Valerie?” I asked.

“Double date.  Kim’s got a Lebanese guy she goes out with, and he has a friend . . . you know.  We ladies are in high demand here in the fleshpot of West Africa.”

Nolan’s laugh, a sardonic bark, reminded me that Sharon had basically given up on being asked by him for a date.  The straw on the camel’s back had occurred when she got wind of his dates with Katia.  She had finally given in to a persistent Lebanese fellow who had been pestering her for months.  His family owned an auto parts store, and he roared around Freetown in a hot little red Triumph Spitfire fresh off the design table.   

  There was an awkward silence.  “Can I get you guys something to drink?”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

Nolan was trying to ignore her, thumbing through a coffee table picture book about Lebanon.

“So how was Europe?” she asked to no one in particular, yet fully aware I had been living my hermit’s existence in Waterloo.  “Meet anybody from Sierra Leone?  I heard Harvey was going to Europe.”

“Europe was copacetic.”

“Rumor had it you were looking to get laid by some six foot Scandinavian.”

“Rumor has it you are getting laid by some five foot camel jockey.”

“My, aren’t we touchy tonight!  Actually, he’s five foot five—just a little shorter than Stephen.”

Nolan got up.  “Come on Stephen.  Let’s get out of here.”  And thus our ravening desire for the company of women came promptly to an end.

We walked this time, instead of jogging, back to the Methodist compound, despondent, our vague illusions about being in the company of women blown away like smoke.  However, when we got back to Nolan’s place, we found ourselves still craving something more than simply each other’s company.  Nolan suggested a ride out to the Cape Club on Lumley Beach for a scotch addendum to the Kentucky bourbon.  Misery loves company, they say, and it’s easier to drown one’s sorrow at a nightclub than wallow in it at home listening to Mahler.  Surely, there would be some “action” at the club.

The Cape Club was way to hell and gone at the northern end of Lumley beach.  The last time either of us had been there, the rainy season was still a month off.  A band, supposedly from the Congo, had enlivened our nights then.  In the dry season you had to play chicken with a dozen other half-stewed drivers to find a parking place.  Now, the lot held only two other cars.  The festive colored lights around the building’s exterior hadn’t been turned on.  A solitary dim bulb burned over the entry, illuminating the bleached letters: C-A-P-E C-L-U-B.

“Shit,” said Nolan as we parked next to the door.

“I’ll second that.”  I couldn’t remember the place ever being this dead.

We made our way to a table along the low wall that fronted the beach.  The indentions in the seats of the metal chairs held little puddles of rain water.

“Shit begorra,” said Nolan.

Tipping the chairs, we wiped them with our palms, a futile gesture for we still wet our rears when we sat down.  A live band had been replaced by a phonograph playing country-western 45’s over speakers that rasped like those cheapies on the old classroom Bell and Howell movie projectors.  No waiter came.

“Shit,” sighed Nolan.

“Bloody shit,” I amended, getting up and walking over to the bar.

An African male, who could only be described as obese in the most grotesque sense of the word, sat at one end of the bar talking in confidential tones to the tall, blonde bartender.  A pint-sized Syrian fellow was perched on a stool at the other end trying to spark a conversation with a parrot, a regular fixture at the club.  The vignette put me in mind of Nolan’s ethnic slur to Sharon—camel jockey.

“You play billiards?” he asked as I ordered drinks.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how,” I answered.

“Pocket pool, eight ball?” he gibed.

“Sorry,” I said, picking up the drinks.

At our table Nolan greeted me with “I felt a drop of rain.”

“You did not.”

“I distinctly felt a drop of rain, Livingston!”

“Bullshit.  Here’s your rocky scotch.  Drink it and quit whining.”

“There!” he said in affirmation, holding his finger in the air.

“Take your finger out of the air and—“

“—and another!  It’s raining, Livingston!”

Gently the spigot opened and we fled to the veranda.

“No women, no dancing, that god-awful music and now rain—Jesus, what an execrable way to begin another year in West Africa” Nolan groaned.

“I’ll drink to that.”

Johnny Cash walked his line over the rasping speakers, his gravelly voice nearly drowned out by the increasing noise of the rain on the veranda roof.

“When does your school start?”

“Please don’t remind me.  Staff meeting next week.  Old prick head will probably have us stand at parade dress all morning while he rolls out a new set of regulations for ‘all s-s-scholars and t-t-t-t-teachers’.”

“To think we did this to dodge the draft.”

“Rumor had it at the end of last school year that stammering idiot wanted me to take over Phil’s P.E. and Arts and Crafts this year.”

“A little exercise would do you good.  You’ve already got wrinkles under your tits.”

“He can stick his P.E.  What the hell do these kids need exercise for?  They get all the exercise they need walking to and from school.”

“It’s not for the kids.  It’s to keep the staff in shape.”

“Four sections of math—maybe two of the new math—that’s all I want, baby.”

The entrance door banged open.  I gestured toward the entrance as Nolan turned in his seat.  “Look what the rain washed in.”

We watched as the evening’s first and only female attraction shuffled across to the bar—tall , nearly six feet, built like an Amazon.  She wiped the rain from her face with the hem of her dress, revealing nothing but several other layers of cloth.  At the bar she removed the bandana from her head and wrung it out over the floor.  As statuesque as she was, she certainly was no beauty.  The barkeeper paid no attention to this new customer; the black man gave her one glance then returned to their conversation.

“Oink,” I said in a confidential whisper to Nolan.

She sat on the edge of a stool nearest the short Syrian who had given up on the parrot and now animatedly drummed on the bar clearly out of sync with the rhythm of another country western song.

“Beaver,” said Nolan.  

She turned to talk to the Syrian.  The parrot was eyeing the new customer with curiosity while the short fellow ignored her and began making clucking noises at the parrot while keeping up his bizarre rhythms on the surface of the bar.  I sat staring Nolan down, trying to deflect his interest in the only woman at the club.  As she surveyed our area, Nolan got up the nerve to get her attention, but just as he began the gesture, she turned back to the bar.  

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, “this rain is making me horny.  Did I tell you about this blonde I met in Denmark?”

“About two hours ago.”

The Amazon started yelling at the blonde-haired barkeeper to turn off the “crap on the gramophone.”  Her stock suddenly went up a few points.  The guy said a curt word or two back, wiped the bar between himself and the fat African and went back to ignoring her.  She raised her voice, demanding a drink, but he stubbornly refused to look in her direction.  

The Syrian began talking loudly in Krio to the parrot, evidently something insulting about the woman.  She whirled and viciously sucker punched him in the jaw, knocking him to the floor.  He sat there a moment, shaking his head, then sprang to his feet, charging low.  Extending her legs out just before he made contact, she deflected his charge headfirst into the bar.  The impact startled the parrot, which began squawking, bringing the blonde barkeeper double-timing around the bar.  He grabbed the Syrian, who was readying himself to charge again, by the hair and simultaneously shoved the woman off her stool.  She spit one last insult at the Syrian and then shuffled haughtily towards the lady’s room.  The young barkeep yelled after her to get the hell off the premises, but he had his hands full trying to restrain the Syrian.

I saw a gleam in Nolan’s eye.

“Pig,” I said.

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” I shot back.  But already Nolan was headed towards the restrooms.  By the time I had gulped the rest of my drink down, the woman had reappeared.  Nolan gently took her by the arm and gallantly ushered her toward the entrance.  She was the same height as Nolan, about four inches taller than me.

We drove back to the Methodist compound in blinding rain.  She and Nolan sat in the back keeping up a steady flow of inane conversation.

“My name’s Nolan.  That’s Stephen,” he said, pointing at me.  “What’s your name?”

“Juliet.”

I started giggling, but Nolan rapped me on the back of the head.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing out on a night like this?” he asked.

“My father is a J.P.  He owns the Alosha Bakery on Pademba road.  He makes very much money.  I do not have to beg.”

“Precisely what I thought to myself the moment I first laid eyes on her.”  I ducked forward to escape a second blow from Nolan.  A truck coming from the other direction threw a blinding spray against the windshield and the lights of the car trailing the truck turned the windshield into a blinding sheet of light.  A numbing buzz was coursing through my head and down into my fingers and toes.

“Watch where the hell you’re going!” Nolan yelled, but too late as our side view mirror got a piece of the car’s skin.  I pressed down harder on the accelerator to make our getaway, checking the mirror for signs of looming headlights on our tail.

“Dis man draiv lehk krez,” Juliet giggled, leaning over the front seat while she stroked the back of my head.  “Yu na kraz, pa,” she crooned.  Our new companion slipped freely from English to Krio and back again seemingly without rhyme or reason or perhaps for reasons that lay hidden in the mystery of her origins and upbringing.

“A krez-o.”

She patted me on the shoulder.  “Juliet like crazy man.  Juliet likes all crazy people.  My father say I am crazy.”  She turned and faced Nolan.  “He owns the Alosha bakery.”

“More like crazy drunk,” I said.  “No wonder that Syrian preferred to commune with the bird.” 

“Livingston, will you cool it!  You want to get laid, don’t you?”  Nolan was hanging on every word she said, nodding off affirmatives, a puppet on the strings of some perverse impulse.

“That pigmy at the bar say I am my father’s pimp.  I do not pimp for my father.”

“No,” Nolan agreed, his head swinging to and fro like the balance wheel of a watch.

“My father says I am crazy.  He owns the Alosha Bakery.  He told me to get out: my father told me to leave his house.  He say I am not his daughter.”  

I began noting that the English appeared to come whenever her father entered the conversation.  Clearly, if redundancy was a gauge, she was more stewed than we were.  Nolan, however, hung on every word as if she were the oracle of Delphi.

“Do you think I am crazy?” she asked me, leaning over the back of the seat again.  “I like everybody: black, white, pink, blue or red.  It don’t make any difference.  My father says I am crazy.  I told him I like the white as well as the black.  There’s no difference, don’t you think?”

“Of course . . . of course,” Nolan assured her.

“But my father threw me out of his house.  He kicked me into the street.”

Nolan patted her reassuringly.  She suddenly straightened.  “Do you think the black is as good as the white?”

“Sure.”

“How many black woman have you slept with?”

“Not enough.”

“I know you.  I know you white men.  You have one little white girl and she makes you tense.”

She was hitting us right where it hurt—in the Katia.  Nothing like a clairvoyant companion to throw a wet blanket on the evening.

“Are you circumcised?” she said to Nolan.  “Let me see your prick!” she demanded.

I couldn’t control myself any longer.  Nolan sat in black silence, but I was hysterical.

“Your prick or your life, sirrah,” I barked, swinging the Jeep into the compound entrance.  But I missed by a hair and Silver’s right side slid into the ditch that bordered the drive.  I goosed the accelerator but the wheels whined—the familiar complaint of spinning rubber.

“Livingston, you stupid ass!” 

“Your prick or your life, sirrah!  Driver, one bell for Sir John,” I retorted, now helpless with laughter.

We piled out of the listing vehicle.  I tried to focus on an evaluation of the situation, which only triggered the giggling again.  Nolan suggested I climb back in the driver’s seat while he and Juliet pushed on the rear.  This time I let the clutch out slowly in second gear and after a few shoves the tires found purchase and the Jeep eased back onto the drive.

When I called attention to the mud splattered on his clothing as they climbed back in the Jeep, Nolan merely growled, “Piss on it.”  

I parked the Jeep over alongside Nolan’s new living quarters, and while I tried to entertain Juliet, he went inside to get the key to his old place.

“Thy bawdy hand is now upon the prick of midnight,” I said, noting the keys in his hand as he came back down the stairs.

“Livingston, for Chris’sake,will you shut up!” Nolan hissed.  “You’re going to wake the preacher.”

Juliet and I giggled in unison as we stumbled down the spine of the drive, arm in arm.  “Come knave!  Here’s my fiddlestick, sirrah!”

Nolan swore at me again, then feinted as if to charge in our direction.  I nudged Juliet.  “Yon Capulet hath a lean and hungry look.”  I had a fuzzy impression I had somehow mangled Shakespeare.

Pushing her off the driveway, we began galloping over the wet grass.  We had barely gone a dozen or so yards when Juliet’s foot caught on the edge of her dress and down we went together.  We lay there laughing until the strong fish odor of the dye in her dress and the wetness seeping into my clothes sobered my senses.  A dog on the compound started its prowler on the premises alarm.

Nolan came jogging softly across the grass.  “Livingston, will you cut the crap!”  

“Alright.”  He pinned my arm behind my back.  “Alright already!”

“C’mon, let’s go!” he whispered sharply.

“Where we going?”  Juliet, sensing some conspiracy afoot, now, too, was whispering.

“Dunno,” I shrugged.  But I did know.  We were headed to Nolan’s vacant former living quarters since it was the farther from the preacher’s residence. I also knew the electricity had been turned off after Nolan vacated it.

Juliet and I followed him in silence up the back steps.  He turned the key in the lock then pushed with all his weight against the glass and metal door which groaned as it opened.  Tip-toeing through the kitchen to the dining room, I smelled something rotting, and it wasn’t Juliet’s dress.  I had to pull her along now, tugging at her warm yet resistant hand.

“Where are we?” she asked.  “Whose house is this?  Why don’t somebody turn on the lights?”

“Shussh!” I whispered, squeezing her hand.

A sudden scraping noise ahead of us told me Nolan had bumped into a piece of furniture.

“Goddamn!”  Nolan hissed through clenched teeth.

“What’s the matter?”  I blinked, trying to see into the claustrophobic blackness of the room.

“Damned coffee table—I banged my shin.  Christ, somebody must’ve moved the sonavabitch!”

“Turn on the lights.”  Juliet’s voice now had a note of urgency in it.  “Why don’t somebody turn on the lights?”

“Shussh!”  Nolan and I both warned.

He took her hand and steered her through the darkness to his old bedroom.  I heard their voices indistinctly, then the metal springs of the bed.  Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dark.  Nolan came padding back into the dining room in his Jockey briefs, and laid his shirt and shorts over the back of a chair.

“I’ll go first, okay?”

For some reason, the presumption of his undress didn’t seem to beg the question.  “Be my guest.”

The bed started squeaking again and I reached over and pulled a pack of cigarettes and matches from his shirt pocket.  All the windows had been closed and the stillness of the air in the room was stifling.  My T-shirt clung to my neck and chest.  I got up and moved carefully back toward the kitchen and out onto the back stoop where I lit the purloined cigarette.  Part of the sky had cleared and a faint breeze had come up carrying with it a floral scent which helped dispel the stench of the kitchen.  In the distance I saw the familiar lights of the Colony Mountains, like stars low on the horizon.  Rich, comfortable, remote lives going on—the altitude of the elect.  The roar of traffic just outside the compound probably carried to their ears, but didn’t get their attention, no more than the noises of our risky dalliance with Juliet.  The restless machinery of Freetown’s humanity tamed by space—no more disquieting than the distant bark of a dog or the night rhythms of cicadas.

A figure suddenly appeared at the foot of the steps.  My heart nearly beat the smoke out of my mouth.  As my eyes refocused, I recognized the familiar outline—the compound’s night watchman.

“Evening, pa,” I said, regaining my composure.

“Eve’nun, Cap’n,” he returned gaily, as if lifted from a Faulkner story.  

“Nice night,” I said.

“Oh, nice night, Kurnal.”  My honorary rank had been suddenly elevated in an annoying tone of brazen familiarity.

I decided not to take him into my meteorological confidences any further.  He stood there staring up at me for a time while I searched for an answer to the yet unasked question hanging in the air: What the hell was I doing on the stoop of this supposedly locked house?  But after a few minutes of silence, he moved off to continue his rounds.  Presume not the white man to scan.

“Good night, Cap’n,” he said, demoting me once again as he retreated into the darkness.

“Night, pa.”

Nolan called softly from inside.  I heard water running in the bathroom.

“Where’s Juliet?”

“Washing her twat.”

“How was it?”

“Her twat or the sex?”

“The sex, peckerhead.”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Did you use a rubber?”

“Now where the hell would I get a rubber?”

“She could have V.D., couldn’t she?  Remember the warnings in training?”

“Too late now.  Maybe we can get the new doc to give us a shot of penicillin.”

The running water stopped and Juliet shuffled into the room.  She hadn’t removed her dress and I could still detect the faint but, nonetheless, repugnant fish odor.  Between that and the rot in the kitchen, the evening’s affaire d’amour had all of the appeal of a visit to a landfill.  But wanting to save face and bring some closure to my quest to get laid, I valiantly accepted her hand as she led me to the squeaking bed where I would all her pleasures prove.

I ground the cigarette butt on the floor and shed my clothes.  Nolan must have opened the windows, for the light breeze that had borne the scent of flowers while I was outside, now slipped in furtive waves through the bedroom and I discovered the deliciousness of being utterly naked.

“Who lives in this house?” Juliet asked, pulling the loose layers of her dress up above her belly button.

“I don’t know.”

I climbed between her sprawled legs, such long legs, so unpredictably smooth in their ascent to the bower sweet chastity had long since deserted.  But the bower was bare—shaved—her belly tapering between ample thighs like the nose of a porpoise.  Searching with my fingers, I discovered its mouth. 

She lay there waiting, a two-by-four had no less life.  Juliet there must be passion!  Don’t you understand?  Love is the union of two: the clinging surrender of woman, the thrusting virile rush of man.  Your body is not a cave, a pit, an empty cup!

But still she remained motionless, water-logged driftwood washed up on a deserted island.

“Why don’t you take off your dress?”

“I don’t want to take off my dress.  It’s too much trouble.  Hurry up.  Come, why don’t you fuck me?”

“But I want all of you,” I said, staring in distress at the foothills of rolled cloth just beneath her breasts.  “I want to suck your breasts.”

“Here,” she said, grudgingly popping a breast from her bodice.

Masa wan love apple?  A go gi yu fain one.  Luk am!

The gesture was tactless, but the fruit tantalizing.  And so I licked and sucked her offering, this forbidden fruit, more palatable than the sleek infinity of her legs.

“Juliet, I love you,” I murmured, savoring what I had never before tasted.

“I love you . . . love you, Juliet.”  In the darkness, in the verity of that moment, my mind in ferment, my flesh drinking the warm revelation of hers, I felt that aureole of coming pleasure in my groin, pleasure that would not be denied.

“White man always say that.  He never mean it.  No one loves Juliet.  My father kicked me into the street.”

“No.  No!  I am not like other white men.  I love you.  I want to have a child by you—our child.”  As drunk as my brain was on alcohol and lust’s elixir, I knew there was no truth in the words spewing from my lips.  But the radiant current of lust began pulsing throughout my entire being, illuminating a flashing YES to my body’s demon need.

“You do not want black child.  You fuck with your mouth.”

The insult was lost on me.  My roman candle was discharging patriotic red, white, and blue balls of fire between her legs.  I burrowed and bit and sucked at her love apple trying to jump the stallion of arousal over the void that yawned below.  But the thundering in my ears diminished, and the stud between my legs withered like a balloon from which the air had fled.  The stink of her clothing filled my nose, her flesh suddenly damp and pulpy like a carcass dragged through wet grass.  I thought of V.D.  and in that darkness I felt my mother’s eyes.

“Are you going to fuck me or not?”

Surely she can feel I’ve gone off, I thought.  I began searching with my fingers.

“Give me your dick.”

I had shrunk from lover to child.  I slid further down her body to keep her cannibal hands from the shriveled vestige of my manhood.  I smelled smoke.

“Do you smell smoke?” 

She lay silent a moment, sniffing the air.  “I smell something,” she said, the imperative edge of her voice gone.

“There aren’t any lights in this house,” she said, drawing her legs up quickly.  “I have tried the light in here and in the bathroom.  What kind of house has no lights?”

A burning house.  The odor became stronger.  I rolled to the edge of the bed.  On the floor, tiny glowing filigrees wormed their way across the clothing I had dropped on the floor.

“Jesus!  It’s my clothes!”

I jumped from the bed and ran to the bathroom, groping in the dark for a glass, a pan, anything that would hold water.  I cupped my hands beneath the faucet and rushed back to the bedroom dribbling water in my path.  Juliet was on the floor beating on my shorts with her hands.

“Here,” I said, flinging the few remaining drops in the direction of her hands.

“Wait man na ful,” she said triumphantly, holding aloft my smoking underpants.  She put her hand through the jagged hole in the crotch.

“Ow dis tin hapin?”

“I thought I put it out—the cigarette.”

She laughed, throwing the underpants on the floor.

“Kam, wait man!  Yu go fohk mi.”

She grabbed my dong and began to caress it, holding its head to her nipples and, when that didn’t have the desired effect, kissing it.  I was appalled; so was my dong.  How could a woman bring herself to do such a thing, to a stranger, just for a few shillings, or pounds?  I wanted to run but she had me at a tremendous disadvantage.  Sir John was in the enemy’s hands, disconsolate, refusing to muster.  There is nothing so ludicrously contemptible as that shriveled, piece of the male anatomy cowering between one’s legs.  I began sniffling.

“Wetin do, yu dey krai?”

The harshness and contempt had gone from her voice.  Thinking this might be a good card to play, I started to cry.

“Why are you crying?”

She loosened her grip and I sprinted around the bed to the door, scooping up whatever clothes I could on the run.

“Yu, wait man!  Kam fohk mi,” she yelled, but didn’t give chase.  

I bumped into Nolan on his way to the bedroom.  “Jesus Christ, what are you doing, Livingston?”

“Ask her,” I thumbed the direction of the bedroom and squeezed past him headed for the back door.

Clutching the handful of clothes across my manhood like a shy kid in a locker room, I took the stairs two at a time.  Loose rock at the bottom of the stairs stabbed my bare feet throwing me off balance.  I staggered to a small banana grove behind the garage where I inventoried the clothing in my hands: one sock, a shirt and an undershirt.  No pants.  No fucking pants!  Not even my show and tell undershorts.

Noises came from inside the house: the screech of furniture on the tile floor, a door banging, angry voices.  Juliet began singing.  I heard the gravel crunching under someone’s feet.  The night watchman?  I covered myself with the clothes again, clutching them like the fig leaf of my first ancestor.

“Stephen!”  It was Nolan.

“Over here,” I whispered.  “Behind the garage.”

He stepped warily around the corner of the garage.  “What the hell did you do to her?”

“What did I do to her?  She was going to yank my peter off, all because I didn’t ‘fohk’ her.”

“She’s tearing the place apart.  I tried to shut her up with a handful of pound notes, but she threw them in my face—said you insulted her.”

It finally dawned on him I was naked.  “Where the hell are your clothes?”

I held the wad of clothing up to his face.  “My pants are still in the bedroom most likely.  I just grabbed what I could and got out of there.  I’ve gotta go back and get my pants.”

So we snuck back to the staircase once more.  Juliet was still singing as we mounted the stairs.  While Nolan tried to distract her, I slipped into the bedroom to look for my pants.  I could hear him trying unsuccessfully to pacify her but she now stood atop a coffee table sprinkling libations of bourbon from the White Rain bottle onto the living room floor.  She was singing verses of “Yes, Jesus loves me.”  When I returned to the living room, pants in hand, Nolan had managed to get her down from the coffee table and had rescued the White Rain bottle.  But she wouldn’t stop singing.

While Nolan clamped his hand over her mouth, I held more pound notes in front of her face.  It had the desired effect as, reluctantly, she stuffed the money in her bodice and followed us from the house murmuring, “Why are there no lights in that house?  What kind of house has no lights?”

We ran with a sense of urgency back to the Jeep.  I jumped in the driver’s side while Nolan, against her protests, managed to shove her into the back seat.  As we passed through the entrance to the compound, she began singing again:

“Jesus loves me, this I know,

For the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to him belong;

They are weak, but He is strong.

Sticking her head out the window, she sang refrain after refrain for the benefit of the pedestrians we passed and the vehicles that passed us.

Yes, Jesus loves me!

Yes, Jesus loves me!

Yes, Jesus loves me!

The Bible tells me so.

Nolan was holding his head in his hands.  “My God, what will they do to us if we get pulled over by the cops?”

“Juliet, where do you live?” I asked.

But she ignored the question and kept on singing as I drove aimlessly up and down the streets of Freetown.  I knew that song from my days in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School, never realizing it had so many verses.

Nolan turned suddenly in his seat and grabbed her by both shoulders.  “Tell us where you live, for God’s sake?”

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” she replied sternly, shaking her finger in Nolan’s face.  

“Juliet, please tell us so we can take you home,” I pleaded.

“My father owns the Alosha bakery.  He kicked me out of the house.”

Ah yes, how well we know, I thought.  But where the hell is the Alosha bakery?  She was like some warped or scratched vinyl record stuck in a groove.  It needed a jolt now and then to get in another groove.  Nolan provided the jolt by yanking on the bandana that bound her hair.  She responded by slapping him on the side of the head.

Then, just as suddenly, she became penitent.  “Sorry.  I’m sorry.  Please, please, forgive me.”  

I kept thinking what a field day a shrink would have with this woman.  For that matter, those practiced in the art of drawing out repressed images buried in our pasts might find a treasure trove of material buried within my own retelling of this night’s fiasco—my first real attempt to get laid.  

I couldn’t help but feel a spark of pity for Juliet.  Obviously, something had gone wrong somewhere in her tangled past: she had issues, father-daughter issues it seemed.  We had courted her at the club and in bed, thinking only of a moment’s bliss or simply caught up in the mindless pursuit of something neither Nolan nor I had ever experienced.  Now she simply posed a problem: how to rid ourselves of her.

We asked for directions to her house, which she gave this time, but when we arrived at the street she had directed us to, she changed her mind.  “No, I forget.  This is not the place.  I think maybe it is in the other direction.”  And so we wound through the torturous side streets of Freetown for nearly half an hour, stymied by one false possibility after another.  Finally, Nolan ordered me to pull over.

“What?”

“You heard me—pull over!”

“Why?  What for?”

“This is a wild goose chase.  We can’t drive around town all night looking for a home she probably doesn’t have.  And we’re sure as hell not taking her back to the compound.  My luck there has run out.  How we managed not to wake the preacher with all the commotion and racket is beyond me.  You want to take her to Waterloo?”

Juliet appeared to be ignoring our conversation.  She had discovered more verses to “Jesus loves me.” 

“We can’t just drop her off anywhere.”

“You have a better suggestion?  Like I said, it’s pretty obvious she doesn’t have a permanent home, and she seems to have issues with her old man.  Hell, she could keep us driving in circles all night, or what’s left of it.  Based on what she keeps telling us about her father, she’s been living on the streets.  She’s a whore for Chris’sake.”

“Yu, wait man, yu fohk wit yu moth.”  Something had jolted Juliet from the “Jesus loves me” groove.

I brought the Jeep to a stop.  Nolan had taken out more pound notes from his wallet, and stepping down onto the pavement he waved them at Juliet.  I was amazed at the readiness with which she took the bait.  Stepping down unsteadily from the Jeep, she smoothed out her dress, straightened the bandana on her head, and snatched the money from Nolan’s hand.

Jumping back into the Jeep, Nolan shouted at me, “What the hell are you waiting for? C’mon, goose it; let’s get the hell outa here!”  

And with that, our ménage a trios with Juliet came to an end.  A costly evening, in money, in Kentucky bourbon, yes—and the anxiety we now might harbor venereal disease.  But watching her figure shrink in the rear view mirror left me with a sense of guilt, however modest, and I fear Nolan, beyond his bluster, was nagged by kindred sentiments.  That reflection in the mirror was my last glimpse of Juliet, a forlorn figure, bereft of father, family, friendship, the simple security of a place called home, standing there on the side of the road, alone, watching another pair of Johns—with whom she had shared, on the most intimate level, this evening of her life—slip away into the night.  And I heard the voice of the Prince of Verona:

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo(s).




* * * *

Chapter 17

Like Ron, my roommate the previous year, I waited until the last minute to show up at Fourah Bay College to meet the new recruits, in particular the neophyte with whom I would share a bedroom in Waterloo.  I wouldn’t have owned up to it at the time, but I was being a bit of a jerk, a way of showing rather than telling my new roommate who held the cards of experience.  Showing up late helped reinforce the rumors I knew he would hear that would put him on guard: Stephen Livingston, in his hermit’s existence in Waterloo, was close to “going native.”  I was the tested veteran, a survivor of one year in the white man’s grave.  Just as Ron had introduced me to the reality of how things were and how they got done on “African time,” so now it was my turn to tenderize the fresh meat.  

However, it didn’t work out that way.  There was something in Josh’s demeanor that immediately said “I’m not a follower; I’m used to calling the shots.”  Perhaps having been president of a fraternity at the University of Washington had something to do with it, a role that seemed to carry over into his training for Sierra Leone.  It didn’t take long to sense he was a leader among the new batch of recruits.  Whereas I had vacillated as I vainly tried to carve out my own mission in Sierra Leone and my relationship to the students, my colleagues (white and black), and West Africans in general, Josh never wavered in pursuing with single-mindedness the mission he confided in me our second day at the dinner table.

“There’s a girl in our group; her name is Michelle.  I knew from the moment I set eyes on her I wanted to marry her.  Charlie, my best friend during training, and I were comparing notes one day about the girls in the group, and I told him, ‘Charlie, Michelle is one in a million.  None of the other girls I’ve met in my life can hold a candle to her.  Mark my word, I’m going to marry her before we leave Sierra Leone.’”  And so began his yearlong courtship of this attractive young woman stationed in Freetown.

Josh had one egregious flaw: he was a chain smoker.  Perhaps the cigarettes gave him his air of self-possession, for that was a quality of the smoking habit that I came to relish while trying to come to terms with my loneliness during the rainy season.  I had never smoked before in my life.  My father had smoked his one King Edward cigar each evening but this was the one habit my mother found abhorrent and so he had to retire to the front porch for this daily pleasure in warm weather but was banished to the basement in winter.  I’m not sure I concur with theories advancing the notion that we are satisfying our latent oral cravings for the breasts of our mothers by smoking.  It seems simpler to me than that, an explanation an older uncle once related to me: “smoking is company.”

Josh was one of those people who could not begin the morning without a smoke.  He would sit there on the edge of his bed, blinking away the night’s sleep, the mosquito netting still draped about him, already hacking at 22 like a life-long addict as he inhaled his first Camel of the day.  

* * * * *

Lord, in the morning Thou shalt hear

My voice ascending high;

To Thee will I direct my prayer,

To Thee lift up mine eye.

Koker was thumping the cover of his hymnal rapidly as he led the charge through the morning hymn.  Having raced two bars ahead of his lagging battalion of scholars, he slapped the hymnal shut and gestured for silence.  It came gradually.  Hannah was so into the sound of her own voice that she was the last to recognize all the other voices had fallen silent.  Her embarrassment set the whole assembly to snickering.

“I want you to listen to me,” Koker shouted.  “Listen to me, do you hear?  I’m going to sing this as it should be sung.”

He then ripped through a stanza at the tempo of the William Tell Overture.  And so the song was begun again, Koker once more charging a bar or two ahead of his lagging choir.  As had been the case nearly every school day of the dwindling rainy season during my first year at Peninsula Secondary School, the voices of the students struggled to ascend through the heavy, moisture-ladened air.  And as it had in the past, the sound, however plaintive or off-key, anchored my life in the assurance of continuity.  

But the new year had also washed up changes on our tiny beachhead of education in West Africa.  Ranged on the elevated concrete apron in front of the headmaster’s office, our portrait was only an imitation of that year which was now forever lost.  Next to me stood my new roommate, Josh, and next to him two new African teachers: Ms. Cummings-John, a plump, flirtatious Krio from Waterloo who had moved up from teaching in the Waterloo primary school, and Mr. Kamara, a strikingly handsome Mende from Bo in his mid-thirties, who had moved his wife and two kids to Waterloo to take a position at Peninsula.  On balance, only Ms. Conte, the French teacher, Mr. Awodele, our Nigerian import, and I had returned as veterans of the 1962-63 school year.

Headmaster Clifford stood, legs at parade rest, his hands locked behind his back clutching a King James Bible.  He smiled, as he usually did, that tense rictus that spoke volumes of impatience, all the while glaring at Koker as though he would like to push him off the concrete apron.

Mr. Koker finally put the hymn to rest, deferring to Clifford, who read from Paul’s letter to the Philippians.  Some of the words were familiar.  There was a staggering number of “whatsoever’s” and then a verse that reached out to me from Bible School: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”  Malcolm paused as he said those words, not as though waiting for them to sink into the passive faces before him, but as if they contained a message he himself had just discovered the substance of.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.”

A hushed silence fell over the student body for a moment as he held the book open in his hands, still staring at the passage he had just read.  Dazed, he turned and started to walk back into his office, forgetting he hadn’t delivered the day’s announcements and the benediction. 

Peninsula was about to embark on a year of reckoning, for the school now had a third form.  Its first encounter with the West African exams lay in ambush near the year’s end—the vultures of accountability now circling.  The student body had grown by about fifty students, hence the need for additional faculty.  The morning assemblies had been moved from the large Home Economics classroom back to the elevated apron in front of the headmaster’s office simply because the larger student body and faculty would no longer fit in the Home Economics classroom.  So once more the assemblies competed with the noise and confusion at the Waterloo intersection.  The football field would have provided a venue with less interference from the outside world, but when faced with a choice between occasional interruptions and the opportunity for both he and his staff to be elevated above the students, Headmaster Clifford, at the urging of his African staff, chose the latter.  Even in matters of the least consequence, it seemed the age-old adage applied as we began the new school year: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

Clifford had surprised us in our first faculty meeting with the announcement that he would be returning with his family to England after the end of the first semester.  I kept wondering if he could be dodging Peninsula’s imminent Waterloo—those West African exams.  Another surprise: a new teacher would be joining the faculty in September, a young man about to finish up his Master’s degree, Mr. Eversole—Orville Eversole, a name I knew some of our scholars would have occasion to mispronounce, raising titters in the classroom.  Orville’s father, we were informed, held the office of Chief Financial Officer in the church hierarchy.  Headmaster Clifford had once been one of Orville’s teachers and, on the basis of this, had been entrusted to look after the young man during his first mission assignment.  

Clifford pulled Josh and me aside after school that first day.  “I’ve talked to the Superintendent of Roads and he has agreed to let us use the vacant house down by the highway.”

“That monstrosity at the bus stop?”  I didn’t mean to be rude, though I would have been had I known his intentions.

“Yes, the flat roof affair with the red tile awnings.  Neither Frida nor I had ever seen the inside, so we took a look at it today.  It has two bedrooms and a formal dining room.  Roof leaks a bit—to be expected, of course, with a flat roof—but that can probably be remedied with a little patching.  It’s really quite elegant.  There’s even a night watchman that comes with the place.”

His remarks appeared to be addressed primarily to Josh.

“I thought you lads might take a look at it on your way home today.”

“Why would we want to do that?”

“I was thinking when Mr. Eversole—Orville—arrives, the small bungalow you two live in might be better suited to him; then the two of you could move into the more spacious dwelling.  Each of you would have a bedroom to yourselves.”

“I thought you said the roof leaks.”

“Yes, there’s that.  But I’ve bought a couple of cans of roofing mastic.  It should take care of the leaks.  Frida finds the place charming: there’s the large formal dining room with a staircase at the rear leading up to the roof—very elegant.  The furniture is much newer than our own.  We were tempted to haul off an easy chair or two.  Those fellows at the highway department have no inclination to keep up the place.  They just let the water pour in and ruin the furniture.”

“I thought you said the furniture was in good shape,” I said irritably.

“Actually, I said it was newer than ours.  Some of it has suffered a little from the wet, but all the more reason to do something before it is ruined.”

“Who’ll fix the roof?”

Malcolm lifted his eyebrows at the querulous tone in my voice.  “Well, I can probably hire someone to get the job done.  Shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, though one of the locals would probably piddle away an entire day.  It’s not a difficult job, likely not even messy with this new fiber cement.”

So Clifford gave us the key and we stopped on our way home to check out the place.  I had always been curious about the inside.  Built like the structures on the Methodist compound in Freetown—the living quarters at the second story level, a garage and a modest servants’ quarters underneath—it stood with commanding presence, set back about seventy-five feet from the highway.  Unlike the bungalow on the hill, there wasn’t a tree within a hundred yards of the place. And unlike the dwellings on the Methodist compound, the roof was flat, bordered at the edges by a concrete balustrade.  I wondered what its history was: why had it stood vacant so long and who had been its prior inhabitants?

Not exactly palatial, but definitely not fitting the Peace Corps image of the thatched roof hut.  Nothing quite so grand existed in all of Waterloo, and only the D.C.’s residence which the Cliffords now occupied was bigger.  Fourteen tiled steps led up to the entrance door.  Once inside you moved through an empty anteroom and then under the arched entrance to the living room.  The floors of the bungalow had been painted concrete; this place had red tile throughout.  But the Cliffords were right, the piece de resistance was the dining room—certainly elegant by African standards, especially that staircase at one end.  The furniture was sparse throughout, armoires instead of closets in the bedrooms, the dining room furnished only with a breakfront, a long dining table and chairs.  Some of the furniture had been damaged; the center of the dining table sported a tell-tale white circle where water had dripped and evaporated.  Similar circles dotted the tile floor.  Unable to resist, we climbed the stairs to the roof.  With no rain forest to obstruct the view, one could see in all directions for nearly a half mile.

“Whatdayathink?” Josh asked as he peered over the balustrade at the outbuilding behind the house.  This structure supposedly housed the watchman and his family of five yet was no bigger than the building where Samuel had lived.

“The house is definitely more spacious.  Different from the bungalow—kinda naked without any trees around.  Might get pretty hot in the dry season.”

“I like the space, especially the separate bedrooms.  I was thinking about the future.  I’m going to ask Michelle to marry me before Christmas.  That big bedroom would be perfect.  She’d like the chest of drawers . . . and she’d love the dining room.”

“There’s the noise from the intersection and bus stop to consider.”

“That shouldn’t be much of a problem.  The roads are pretty empty at night.”  

“What about the leaks?”

“Like Clifford said, those can be patched.”  He scanned the surface we were standing on.  “It certainly looks solid.”

“Flat roofs can be problematic in this climate.  You haven’t experienced the rainy season in all its glory.”

But Josh shook it off.  “I’ll take care of the roof.  It surely can’t be that bad or there’d be more damage inside.”

Thus, the first order of business for the new school year became the move from the hill down to the highway.  Like I said, Josh had a way of getting his way.  And that continued in his regular appropriation of the Jeep.  Like Ron, he took off each weekend, not to visit the beach but to spend time with Michelle.  I couldn’t object too strenuously; after all, I still had the Renault.  To give Josh his due, he took the task of teaching much more seriously than Ron, and I soon became slightly jealous of what I felt was his growing but still to be earned popularity with the students.

Since our new digs were already furnished, we had only to move our personal belongings, our desks, plus the refrigerator and stove which belonged to the Peace Corps.  Because the fridge had no compressor, once we removed the kerosene storage tank, it proved to be relatively light though bulky.  

My desk was still stacked with ungraded exercise books left untouched during the months of July and August after school had let out.  Suspended in a moment’s guilt, I carelessly picked up one pile and some of the books on top slid off, falling to the floor.  A loose, folded sheet of foolscap fluttered out of one.  Picking the book up, I noticed it belonged to Kadiatu, the school girl who stayed at the Clifford’s residence.  As I started to reinsert the paper in the exercise book, I saw a poem had been scribbled on it:

In America City where I dwell

A Peace Corp boy I love so well

He cutted me my heart away

And then with me he could not stay.

There was a lady in that same town

My lover took her and set her down

He took a stranger upon his knees

And told her all he has done for me.

Oh mama dear you doo not know

The pain and grief and sorrow there

Go get a chair and set it down

And pen and ink to write it down.

Upstairs she went to make her bed

And nothing to her mama said

As she enters into the room

She found her hanging upon a rope.

I remembered the poetry class I had taken at Mizzou and the poem returned to me with a “C--” and the word “Bathos” scribbled in the margin.  Another of the professor’s favorite putdowns was “Doggerel.”  What I held in my hands had both qualities in spades, a hobbling, mangled imitation of some Scotch-Irish ballad.  Yet I read on, drawn in by the anonymous reference to a Peace Corps “boy”:

Her papa then returning home

And asking for his daughter dear

As soon as he enters the room

He found her hanging opon a rope.

He drew his knife and cut the rope

And mable tears from his bossom fly

Saying what a foolish girl am I

To hang myself for a Peace Corp boy.

Go dig my grave both deep and wide

Plant mable stones at my head and feet

And a turtle dove opon my breast

To show the world I died of love.

Refain: (repeet after the hole verse)

Oh no move made the maid again

Oh no move made the maid again

Oh no move made the maid again

Till apples grow on cherry trees.

Had Kadiatu written this?  I wondered.  And why was it in her exercise book?  Was it meant for my eyes?  And if it was, what could that presage? 

* * * * *

Clifford asked me into his office the following day after assembly.  “I wanted to thank you for taking care of the car while we were away.  Also congratulate you on the work you did over the summer fixing the roof on the science lab and getting the football field in shape.”

“I couldn’t do much with the field.  It will take some kind of heavy equipment to really level it.  I also didn’t get around to laying the water pipes in the lab and home economics room.”

“Yes, Pedar told me you were ill for awhile.  Don’t worry about the water pipes.  There’s not enough money in the budget for a well for another couple of years.  As for the field,  it’s probably the best we can do for now.” 

He handed me a small stack of mail.    

“What are these?”

“Letters from other schools—it seems the word has gotten around that we have a football team.  These are invitations from divers hands addressed mostly to the ‘captain’ of our team, some to the ‘Games Master.’  Two of them came by post, others have been slipped to me by our scholars who commute from Kissy, Hastings, and Cline Town.  I fear the lot of them is testimony to the pathetic state of English instruction in Sierra Leone.  Either the grammar and spelling are abysmal or the invitation is couched in 17^th century prose—the flattery of a vassal petitioning his lord.”

He took the pile from my hands.  “Here, I wanted you to take a look at this one.”

It was from the games master at a Catholic secondary school in Freetown.  Located on the east end of Freetown harbor and adjoining the poorer precincts of Cline Town and Kissy, Bishop Johnson Secondary School had been started the same year as Peninsula.  However, since its African Headmaster was not as discriminating as ours, both in the selection of its scholars as well as its teaching staff, the school had grown at breakneck pace and already boasted the third largest secondary school enrollment in Sierra Leone, even though (like Peninsula) it had just begun its third form.  

“I interviewed this fellow for a position at Peninsula,” he said incredulously.  “When I discovered during the course of the interview he couldn’t multiply 9 times 7, I showed him the door.  The man’s an imbecile as you can readily discern from his writing.”

But a gleam was emanating from his eyes as he spoke.  “I have no doubt we will best their scholars in this year’s third form exam, but wouldn’t it be something to beat them on the athletic field as well?  What do you say?  Can you get the lads up to taking them on?”

I wanted to say no after the humiliation the previous year in Magburka.  The team hadn’t practiced since then, still had no uniforms, nor socks with school colors nor shoes, thanks to Samuel.  From my reading, I had learned a little more about the game’s strategies, its offensive and defensive tactics, but still felt unqualified to coach a team in this game we called soccer in the States.  A year in Sierra Leone had taught me that young African boys love nothing better than grandstanding: showing off their dribbling skills.  None of the books discussed the concept of creating teamwork.  Yet it was difficult to say no to Clifford’s sudden enthusiasm for the game and to the prospect of the excitement that might spread through the school if we could field a team.  School spirit was definitely a missing ingredient at Peninsula.

“I’ll give it a try,” I said.  So a date was set, too soon for my liking, for we had to find new players.  The team not only no longer had the services of Samuel but three other players had defected to Freetown schools.  I quickly convened a meeting of those interested in forming a new team to face Bishop Johnson and discovered the interested parties were indubitably of one mind: the process of selecting replacements for the departed members of the team could be solved only by the rhetoric of personal attack (ad hominems, as they are called) and staged histrionics the like of which had not been witnessed since the era of silent film.  Finally, I threw up my hands and pointing to my own choices said, “You, you, you, and you will be on the team.”

After school, on the day of the match, Josh and I crammed the chosen eleven into trusty Silver and my Renault and headed for Freetown.  The game, as I had predicted to myself, quickly turned into a complete disaster for Peninsula.  Sierra Leoneans will take a back seat to no one in their taste for football theater: fouls, fights, faking injuries, and general grandstanding.  The spectacle can be comic in retrospect, but for Josh, the players from Peninsula, and myself, it quickly took on all the charm of the afternoon from hell.

Since our players had never completely acquiesced to the offensive and defensive positions I had assigned them, shortly after the first five or so minutes of play, the team’s strategy, just as in our game the previous year with Magburka, was to chase the ball.  Most of the players soon became winded, except, of course, for the goalie; thus, the job of salvaging Peninsula’s honor settled on this unfortunate fellow, chosen for the position only because of his poor ball handling skills.  Never having played in a school match before, he let the first two shots on goal roll between his outstretched hands and spread feet.  Thankfully, this was mostly a matter of nerves and, because Bishop’s players took so many shots on goal, he soon became adept at fending off the majority of them.  Nonetheless, the outcome was depressing: eight-zip.

In victory, Bishop Johnson proved magnanimous.  They served our team cookies and soda which our players were too humiliated to enjoy.  Small primary school children and various other spectators who hung around after the game only added to their chagrin, re-enacting the comedic highlights of Peninsula’s inept play.  I tried not to smile at their antics, at the expense of swallowing both my own and Peninsula’s pride. 

Mr. During, their Games Master, attempted to be gracious in victory but proved tactless.  He “truly appreciated” how hard it was for such a small school like Peninsula to field good players.  Then he went on to detail the merits of his own coaching, adding a pointer here and there—solely for my benefit—that would surely improve the quality of Peninsula’s play.  Occasionally, During chided one of the hecklers surrounding us who couldn’t resist trashing Peninsula’s pitiful attempt to field a football team.  They meant no harm, he assured me.  Then, he proposed a rematch—this time at the school field in Waterloo.

Another match?  Since our team had proved to be absolutely no competition for Bishop, the proposal smacked of sadism: another afternoon of humiliation for Peninsula to be played out before its student body and the community of Waterloo. He assured me, however, our team would improve with practice.  His congenial river of assurances spilled over into the role of team sports in Sierra Leone’s future.  It would help to shape a new national identity.

Searching for a tactful way to decline the invitation, my mind flailed helplessly like some small bug stuck in Master During’s charmed web. I wanted badly to avenge this defeat, but the sting of it written on the long faces of Peninsula’s players made me reluctant to confound their hopes with further embarrassment.  So I stalled with the only response I could muster on such short notice: I would have to check first with my Headmaster.

Finally, after much fatuous well-wishing, I managed to disentangle myself from During’s tacky presumption.  The boys were clearly ready to leave and so we sped off on the long, introspective trip back to Waterloo, during which I vowed this day’s embarrassment would not be repeated.

The following week, Clifford called me into his office after morning assembly.

“I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to ask you how the game with Bishop Johnson turned out.”

“Not as we had hoped.”

He flashed his customary sardonic smile.  “I gathered something of the sort from the long faces around here at the beginning of the week.”

He stared out through the bars on the window of his office toward our sloping, yet to be groomed football field.  “You know, I was never really good at sports myself.  Reflexes gave me a poor show, and I decided learning was the important thing—to drink deep at the Pierian spring as Alexander Pope said.”

Still musing, rubbing his chin reflectively, he continued.  “I had hoped to build the reputation of Peninsula on scholarship, though I must confess that even that runs counter to the expectations of the situation here.  I was tempted by the notion of topping Bishop Johnson in both scholarship and sports.”

“The team simply wasn’t prepared for the match,” I said.  “We lost some of our best players from last year’s team, and the players haven’t had enough time to comprehend the value of teamwork.”

“Yes,” he said abstractedly.  “Yes, that’s probably true.  But it was perhaps a good lesson: we had best put Satan behind us.  I let you work on the football field last summer.  You did your best.  But we needn’t suddenly forget ourselves.  The spiritual lives of the scholars is our primary mission—their knowledge both of this world and the next.  I should more enjoy beating Bishop Johnson roundly on the West African exams than in the dust and quarrelsome atmosphere of a football field.  I’m thoroughly convinced we can.  Our teachers are better qualified, our standards for entrance more selective.  Bishop Johnson may have the edge on us in numbers, but we can make up in quality what we lack in quantity.”

“But isn’t a sense of pride in community part of what education should instill?  For once, last Friday, before the game, I felt a wave of excitement running through the school.  Until the game, at least, the students experienced a feeling of pride in belonging to the Peninsula community—school spirit we called it in the States.  It seems to me this is one way to give Sierra Leone what it so desperately needs—a feeling of pride in something beyond its colonial and tribal past.”

My face began to burn as I realized I had parroted the essence of During’s little spiel to me the previous Friday.

“In my experience Americans tend to use the term ‘spirit’ rather loosely, especially where sports are concerned.”  He seemed to sense he had ruffled my feathers a little too roughly.  “But I really don’t want to argue the point.  If you want to devote your time after school to practice, I have no objections.”

How very noble of you, I thought.

“However, Mr. Koker did mention that on the Friday previous to the game, you kept the boys practicing until after five o’clock.  That hardly leaves time for them to prepare for the Sabbath.”

          So there it was—déjà vu once more.  The party line I had heard when Samuel and I had built the benches for the tables in the science lab.  “You’re the boss,” I said, turning to leave the office and delivering one final shot as I exited.  “By the way, Bishop Johnson would like to give us another shot at them in a rematch—this time on our turf."

          *                    *                    *                    *

Chapter 18

This is the dream: you are standing on a rooftop like the one I just described—the flat roof with the concrete balustrade circumscribing it.  The pre-dawn landscape, cast in virtual light, still cloaks the earth’s secret husbandry.  Noises of a nearby waking village wash into your ears like the sound of sea waves imprisoned in a conch’s pearly depths.  You look up into the green mountains behind the rooftop.   Wreathed in early morning mists, they beckon with their siren mysteries.  In the center of one wreath, the rising sun gleams on the white-washed walls of the District Commissioner’s mansion, rearing distant and monastic above the earth.  Then, without transition, you enter the dim light of rain forest, your hearing on high alert as water droplets rain down from the trees like phantom footsteps scampering across the leaf-strewn forest floor.

Without warning, the blood curdling screams of a chimpanzee band fill the forest.  The trees tremble as the chimps swing from branch to branch, circling above in ever narrowing sweeps like the edges of a whirlpool with you at its center.  One dangles in the space before you, reaching out a hand-like appendage that has no digits.  The face is human, the nose and eyes eaten away; it screams, “Dash, masa, do ya gimme dash!”  Other chimps close in as you press forward through the smothering underbrush that slaps and claws at your trespass.  The air carries the putrid smell of carrion flesh.

There is a clearing, a stream—the screams and chatter of the chimps fade away.  A naked woman is bathing in the stream, the water glistening on her tumid chocolate breasts and thighs as she rises into a shaft of sunlight.  The air in this magic circle is weighted with the sweet scent of orange blossoms.  She presses a green snake to her breasts, holds it to her lips to kiss, then lowers it to the space between her thighs.

Half awake, fighting the clinging blanket of sleep, you struggle to right yourself in bed.  Only a dream yet you still feel the swollen fullness in your crotch and see the wilting head of your penis peeking through the fold in the front of your boxer shorts—the cool, sticky circle on your shorts and its pungent, tainted odor, testament to the mind’s collusion in the body’s intrepid mission on planet earth.

* * * * *



I explored that dream so many times, attempting to trace the pixels of the brain’s restless imagery back to their origins: the hands of the beggar at Kingsway department store, a leper’s face at Masanga, Juliet holding my penis to her lips, the trite vignette of a porn movie I saw before we left New York City for Sierra Leone.  Vainly, I attempted to construe the palimpsest of its symbolic narrative: the mysterious lore of Africa, its in-your-face horrors, its Edenic possibilities scattered to the winds by the doctrine of original sin.  Ultimately, the damp shorts confirmed what I already knew.  I was horny: tantalized by the breezy sensuality of African women, yet locked in the Calvinist cell of my upbringing.

Josh’s ongoing affair with Michelle did not help matters.  Compelled to share some of the highlights of his courtship at the dinner table, he readily admitted sexual intimacy with Michelle was out of the question, an admission that did not fit my stereotype of his prior involvement in fraternity life.  When I told him of my dream, he made an even more daring admission: what he feared most was going off prematurely in his pants when their necking came close to spiraling out of control.

I felt I had to make contact with Diane.  The final chapter of our relationship that spring at Mizzou proved that my smart aleck cynicism was bound to drive women away but I still felt, as Josh did about Michelle, that this was the one woman I had met whom I dearly wanted to have a lifelong relationship with.  I had thought several times about writing to her, but where would I send the letter?  I didn’t have her home address, nor did I have her address at college.  We had met during my senior year in a French class, a foreign language requirement I needed in order to graduate with a liberal arts degree.

I began noticing this attractive, dark-haired freshman sitting a row behind me on the other side of the aisle, intrigued by her cloistered reserve in the classroom and the rare but glowing smile that could be teased from her lips.  Each day after French, I watched her escort a blind student to his next class.  Curious about the motives behind this selfless act, one day I followed the two of them, and after she had safely led the young man to his destination, I asked her for a date and, to my surprise, she consented.  At the time she lived in a row of temporary wooden barracks thrown up after the end of WWII to accommodate the hundreds of returning veterans.  Mizzou was still trying to keep pace with its exploding student population when we met: three high-rise dorms for women were under construction but wouldn’t be finished till the following year.

The more we dated, the more I became convinced this was the woman for me.  But I was sorely disappointed when I learned in the spring of 1962, that she was pledging a sorority—Delta Delta Delta.  My early jealousy of Greek life had grown into disdain over the years at Mizzou.  I had neither the grade point, athletic ability, nor the money or connections to become an attractive candidate.  My freshman roommate had been wooed to Greek living because of his GPA at the beginning of our sophomore year.  After barely a month of exploitation as tutor, mentor and babysitter, he defected and returned to the dorms.  Stories of cheating on exams, binge drinking, excessive hazing, orgies, and even a couple of rapes abounded.  I made it my mission to dissuade Diane from her intention to become a Tri-Delt.

Unfortunately, my mission ran counter to her parents’ wishes, and the harder I tried to convince her sorority life was a mistake, the more she resisted.  This always stoked the pretensions of my cynicism. One Sunday evening at dusk, my patience with her stubbornness nearing an end, we were walking, trespassing actually, on a fairway of the University golf course.

Slinking across the fairway not more than fifty feet in front of us was a cat with the twitching form of a baby rabbit in its mouth.  Somehow it profaned even my supposedly jaded sensibilities to witness such cruelty in the sanctity of a carefully groomed greenbelt where wayward nature, one assumed, had been house broken.  It affected Diane even more.  She wanted me to chase the cat.

“That’s life,” I said.  “The food chain . . . survival of the fittest,” or something to that effect.

She stared at me incomprehensibly, her eyes softened by the watery light they held, then ran after the cat herself.

I shared the story with Josh one evening at dinner, hopping for help: a tip on how I might make contact with her.

“What happened then?”

“I never saw her again.  She wouldn’t talk to me after that.  I called the sorority a couple of times but they gave me the runaround.  You’ll probably think this is stupid . . . I want to send her a letter.  But where should I send it?  I don’t have an address.”

“Why not send it to the Pan Hellenic Council at the university or, better yet, address it to her at the sorority, in care of the Dean of Students?  It may take a while, but I’m sure it will get there.”

“You really think I should write?”

“Hell yes, why not?”

So I sat down to draft the letter.  I knew she wasn’t aware of my selection into the Peace Corps, nor my destination, so the text of the letter sketched briefly the training, my first impressions of Africa, its cultural uniqueness, and a highlight or two from my role as teacher.  I disguised the subtext, my loneliness and longing, as best I could, trying to paint the exotic face of  adventure.



* * * * *



Orville Eversole, Peninsula’s late-arriving member of staff.  The syllables stuck to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter—popcorn or goobers.  And, of course, he was from Georgia.  Too bad it wasn’t “-soul” instead of “sole”—something clinging to the bottom of your shoe.  Somehow I got stuck with the job of picking him up in Freetown in the Jeep station wagon.  Josh and Michelle had preempted the house, seizing an opportunity to spend a clandestine weekend together in Waterloo.  Headmaster Clifford was off to Bo for a retreat at the Adventist compound.  So I capitulated when asked if I would pick Mr. Eversole and his luggage up in Freetown and escort our new teacher to his home in Waterloo.

He stood there, penned in by tan Samsonite luggage, staring in wonder at the hive-like confusion of Oxford Street.  Tall and thin, his youthful face scrubbed to near Godliness, a bright beacon of naiveté.  His skin was pallid like Headmaster Clifford’s and drawn tightly over the skeletal frame as if recently rescued from some sunless concentration camp.  The white dress shirt he wore clung to his back and underarms, and beads of sweat glinted like jewels upon his flesh, his sideburns dripping water, the fringes of his hair plastered to his scalp.  An expensive-looking camera weighed his neck forward.  If ever a wayfarer cried silently to be rescued, it was this young man, yet he studiously ignored me as I approached, the only other white face on the street at that moment.

“Looking for someone?” I said.

He feigned surprise.  “Oh, hello.  Why yes . . . yes, as a matter of fact, I guess I am.  Someone was supposed to meet me here.”

“Mr. Clifford sends his apologies; he asked me to pick you up.  My name’s Stephen, Stephen Livingston.  I’m one of the teachers at Peninsula.”

“Oh, yes.  You must be the Peace Corps I’ve heard about.”

“Good things, I hope,” I said offering my hand.

His right hand held a typewriter case, his left forearm had a sport jacket draped over it.  Looking at my offered hand he shrugged helplessly to indicate both of his hands were otherwise occupied, then laughed.

“My name’s” he paused, “my friends call me . . . I guess you ought to call me Orville.”  He flushed a little at not being able to take me into this inconsequential confidence.

His laugh was more awkward this time.  “You know, I really can’t believe you’re here,” he said, surveying the street again.  “I can’t believe I’m here, for that matter.”

“Well, Orville, why don’t we load these bags into my Jeep?  It’s just around the corner.”

I grabbed at the handles of two bags, but Orville remained stationary, staring down the block.  “You see that fellow over there?” He gestured by holding the typewriter out in the direction of a trader who squatted behind an assortment of plastic sandals while idly eyeing the passing traffic.

“The Fulla?”

“The what?” he said with suspicion, as if I had said Mafia.

“He’s a trader.  He sells those sandals.”

“Yes.  I can see that.  But have you noticed the way he’s been sneaking glances at us?”

“We’re a curiosity,” I said offhandedly.

“You don’t think he has designs . . . on my things?” he said, sweeping the arm with the sport coat over his luggage.

Hell yes, he’d love to lighten your load, I thought: a couple of thousand dollars of goodies washed up on the sidewalk.  But I decided to let culture shock bloom in its own season.

“C’mon, let’s get these in the Jeep.”

I hefted the bags I had in my hands, groaning inwardly at their weight, then led the way down the precarious path between the wares spread out on the sidewalk and the gaping rain gutters alongside the street.  When we got to the Jeep, Orville asked if I minded if he picked up a few food staples.  I said I’d load the car while he shopped, pointed to the Chellarams store a few doors away and watched him flutter like a wounded bird in that direction.  He had that kind of archetypal skinniness associated with Ichabod Crane—a homely figure with his pants hitched up a few inches below his armpits.

After loading the Jeep, I found a shaded ledge within view of the car and sat down, letting the city’s tempo ebb from my nerves.  It lacked the goose-step desperation of a cold day in a major American city, but it was accelerating in that direction.  Gone was the lackadaisical pace of the villages in the bush.  Life here hustled to the ring of cash registers.  The city’s cosmopolitan flavor was broadcast in the bold letters of its retailers: SCOA—France; Bata—Czechoslovakia; P-Z—Britain (which the Brits pronounced P-Zed); Chellerams—India; Assad Yazbeck—Lebanon; Dunia—Kuwait; Kingsway—Britain; T. Choitram—India.

Orville finally emerged from the dark mouth of Chellerams burdened with a crate of powdered milk.  Trailing him, a white-aproned carryout struggled to balance two enormous boxes.  They hadn’t gone two steps beyond the threshold before Orville was besieged by an army of urchins, hawking bananas, peanuts, sandals and wooden coat hangers.  Two older hustlers offered the services of nearby taxis.  Orville stopped and made the mistake of buying all the bananas one little girl had.  It set the rest of the child hustlers crazy.

I thought to rescue him remembering that first day when I found myself in similar straits, having disembarked from the bus that carried us from the ferry.  But I fought off the impulse.  Orville attempted, with courtesy and reason, to persuade his jabbering captors he could not possibly buy all of their wares.  But they persisted, thrusting more bananas—superior bananas—in his perspiring face.  He turned to the clerk for help who hurled sundry threats at the swarming circle of pleading faces but, burdened as he was with the boxes, he was helpless to carry out the threats and the kids knew it.

The noise of a whistle pierced the confusion.  A policewoman came charging down the street.  The kids scattered, knocking the clerk off balance, tumbling the boxes to gravity’s whims.  The top box simply thudded to the pavement at the edge of the rain gutter.  The other, however, split on impact and jars of—my God, it couldn’t be!—Bosco went rolling down the street.  One of the smaller urchins laughingly stooped to pick up a jar on the run, lost her balance and dumped her tray of groundnuts with its tin of pennies in the gutter.  She stood at the edge of the gutter, bewildered, terrified, her eyes beginning to tear.  From a safe distance, a few of the older kids urged the little girl to run, but fear had paralyzed her.

I rose from my perch and ran to help Orville retrieve the scattered jars.  Traffic had slowed to a stop and the taxi drivers whom Orville had snubbed now had their revenge honking and yelling at us.  Orville squatted to look under a parked car then waddled duck-fashion to peek under another, his efforts rewarded by the discovery of four jars.

“What the hell are you going to do with all this crap?” I said without thinking of the question’s effect on his nerves.

“Please, just help me,” he said in desperation.  As he rose clutching the jars in his arms, two fell, one breaking at his feet, the other rolling into the path of a taxi nosing impatiently through the melee.

“Stop!” I cried, too late.  A tire pulverized the jar, shooting geysers of chocolate syrup in all directions.

Orville set the rest of the jars in his arms on top of the powdered milk crate.  Just as he finished stacking them, the carry-out ran up yanking and dragging the poor little girl who had lost her groundnuts in the gutter.  He wasn’t gentle as he shoved the struggling, crying child into Orville’s presence.

“Let her go!” Orville shouted at the carry-out.

The man stood there incredulous, still clutching the girl.  He had done this white man a favor by apprehending a vile little thief and what thanks did he get.

“Will you please, for God’s sake, let her go?” Orville half-pleaded, half-threatened.

“Boss, dis na bad pikin.  A bin catch em foh yu.”

Whether for God’s sake or his own, the man loosened his grip and immediately the child tried to break away, clawing and biting at her captor.  The outraged fellow seized her with one arm and began cuffing her with the other.  Orville’s face colored with indignation and he swung at the carry-out stinging the black face with a violent slap.  The blow shocked the man so much he released his grip on the little girl and she vanished into the gathering crowd of spectators.  Insulted and shamed, the carry-out began working himself into his own fit of indignation, pleading his case with vigor before the swelling crowd of jurists.

The policewoman returned, elbowing her way into the center of the crowd.  She began by questioning the carry-out but, snagged on detail after detail of the events, the two began arguing with one another.  This was my chance to slip away, and I motioned to Orville to head for the Jeep.

“You, Peace Corpse!  Where’re you going?”  Her voice cracked like a whip over my head.

I turned, prepared with that innocent, “Who me?” look on my face.  How the hell did she know I was with the Peace Corps?

“It’s my fault,” Orville said, grabbing her elbow to get her attention.

“Take your hands off me,” she spat, recoiling sharply from his grasp.  “Who do you think you are?  You!” she yelled again at me.  “Come.”

Poor, clueless Orville persisted, placing his hand on her arm again.  As he did so, she wrenched her arm violently upward, catching Orville in the mouth.  A mirthful cheer went up from the crowd as he cringed from the blow.  I had a sudden sinking feeling that justice was about to miscarry.

The carry-out decided to curry the lady’s favor by menacing Orville with insults.  She made it clear she was not taking sides, however.  “Yu!  No vehks mi!”

“Kam!” she barked at me.  “Wi go na steshohn.”

I wondered why she suddenly spoke Krio.

“But what about our stuff?”  I pleaded, indicating the loaded Jeep.

“Yu draiv—tek wi.  Leh’s go!”

So we stuffed ourselves into the Jeep: Orville—his cartons, crate and suitcases—myself, and the police woman, who gestured out the window with her baton at the crowd of spectators to clear the way.  Poor Orville was beside himself for he thought we were being arrested.  But at the station, the officer explained in careful English that she thought it best to get the two of us away from the crowd for fear that the situation might escalate, apologized to Orville for his bruised lip, thanked us for the ride and waved good-bye.



* * * * *



Another letter came for me addressed to the “Games Master.”  Turns out the referee at our football match with Bishop Johnson was the Games Master at a military school in Freetown.  I had never heard of the school; none of the Volunteers had been stationed there.  Clifford wasn’t aware of it either.  Why would any coach want to pit his team against Peninsula after witnessing our pathetic performance against Bishop Johnson?   The invitation proposed the match be held on Peninsula’s field.

Here was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down, for transportation always posed a problem.  Perhaps the match might serve as a tune up for the rematch with Bishop Johnson.  If we happened to beat this team, it would prove a psychological boost for our players.  Such were my rationalizations.

When they arrived early in the afternoon on game day by chartered bus, however, clouds began to form over my hopes.  Each player stepping down from the bus had his own little travel bag, as if they had just jetted in on Pan Am.  As they dressed in the science lab, my previsions were further clouded: they donned sparking white uniforms with little regal crests on the shorts and jerseys.  And they had footwear: knee socks in the school colors and shiny cleated shoes.

Peninsula’s eleven looked like an impromptu crew rounded up to face Charlie Brown and company.  They sported t-shirts of sundry colors and most wore their gray school shorts. Footwear consisted of tape, ragged tennis shoes, loafers and plastic sandals.

The trite perception in athletic contests is to see the opposition as significantly larger and older than they really are.  But this was no illusion, just one more surprise—the military school had five forms and some of the players were nearly out of their teens.

How it happened, I’ll never know, but Peninsula scored the first goal.  We had managed to recruit a new center who came highly recommended by the rest of the team.  He was from Hastings, however, and never able to practice after school because he had to catch a bus or lorry home.  But evidently he came as advertised.  I had driven into Waterloo just before the match got underway to buy a case of soda from the local Syrian trader—a treat for the players when the match was over.  When I drove back onto the school compound, general pandemonium reigned.  The game had attracted a rather large gathering of spectators, mostly primary school children and local idlers.  The younger faction had run onto the edge of the field, hugging Peninsula players, leaping and dribbling invisible footballs, pretending they were scoring that first goal.  I had asked Mr. Kamara, our new teacher who was not only handsome but also athletic, to referee the game.  His efforts to clear the field and restore order, however, were largely futile.  No sooner had he run off one little knot of intruders, than another suddenly coalesced in another part of the field.

At my urging, our players finally joined in the effort to shoo everyone off the field except the opposing team.  Just as order had been restored, however, I noticed a large bank of dark clouds forming over the colony mountains.  But these clouds were real, not figurative like the ones obscuring my hopes for a positive outcome to the game.  The sun still shone, but the air became oppressively humid and the flies increasingly agitated.  But rain, in early October,  nearly a month and a half into the dry season?  Not a chance.

Kadiatu was leaning against one of the poles supporting the veranda of the science building as I carried the soda into the lab, her eyes silently, coyly laughing at me, the school master doing manual labor.

“Kehr-am-go watah, Bo,” I said, mischievously ignoring the injunction against Krio on school premises.

“Wetin-du?”

“The players will be thirsty when the first half has ended.”

“Ossai di pail?”

“That is part of your job—finding the pails.  Look in the Form One classrooms.”

“Heeey, a noh go du em.”

Headmaster Clifford came strolling along the veranda from the domestic science room.

“Please.”

She swung in little arcs from one of the poles, pretending to ignore me.

“Some crowd today,” Clifford said, wearing one of his rare genuine smiles.  “Who are we playing?”  A self-serving memory like his could be irritating at times.

“The military school.”

“Kadiatu, you’re behaving like a child, swinging from that post,” he said scornfully.

“I asked her to bring water for the players, but she refused.”

I could see from Kadiatu’s expression I might as well have slapped her, even before Clifford turned on her accusingly.  “Is this true?”

Her quick glare directed at me stung as much as my words had stung her.  She had stopped swinging from the pole, but she still grasped it, her mood turned peevish.

“Go fetch water for Mr. Livingston . . . now,” Clifford said in a low, adamant voice that left no room for argument.

Without a word she broke into a run straight across the football field toward the Form One block of classrooms, making a strange humming noise as she ran, a sound somewhere between a whine and crying.

  “Don’t know what’s gotten into that wench lately,” Clifford said, stroking his chin as he watched her flee.

Meanwhile, the game continued on the football field.  The little discipline I thought I had instilled in our players quickly began to disintegrate.  Again, they quickly forgot to hold their offensive and defensive positions.  Our foes had already won back Peninsula’s initial one point advantage and began to press for another.  The ball was passed to the right midfielder who maneuvered easily among four Peninsula players trying helplessly to defend him.  Suddenly, he passed crisply to the striker right in the area of the penalty box who feinted left then drove the ball like a cannon shot to the inside of the right goalpost.  The ball rocketed across the parking lot and into the yard of Pa Dumbya, the compound’s night watchman.

After that goal, you could read the apprehension in the faces of Peninsula’s players.  A volley of shots on goal quickly ran up the score: visitors-6, home-1.  The sky had become completely overcast with churning dark bluish-gray clouds.  Swirling gusts of wind lifted funnels of dust from the field.  The change in weather proved fortunate for the players since the blazing sun was now tucked behind cloud cover—as long as luck prevailed and it didn’t rain.

It began with those large, portentous drops that signal either a passing false alarm or a gully washer.  I dashed with some of the spectators back under the cover of the veranda of the science block just as the sluice gates of heaven opened.

The players came trotting off the field and I pushed through the perspiring press of bodies to unlock the lab door.  To keep the locals, especially the kids, out of the lab, I locked the door again after the players were all inside.

I went to the window to watch—it was coming down in torrents now—and saw Kadiatu with a small Prep class girl in tow.  Kadiatu had a pail in each hand while the smaller girl balanced one on her head.  Both were soaked and disheveled, water streaming from their noses, uniforms drenched and revealingly plastered to their bodies.  The form of Kadiatu’s ripe breasts, even the tips of her nipples pressed through the flimsy translucent mold of her blouse and bra.

Seeing me at the window, she cried out in a shrill voice, “Mr. Livingston, open the door!”

Head down, she dutifully set the pails of water among the players, enduring in silence the taunts and remarks about her appearance.  Her job finished, she silently slipped out the door.  After nearly fifteen minutes, the rain stopped just as abruptly as it began.  The field, however, now looked like a marsh in a river delta.

Still, the game had to be finished.  Our players spent the remainder of the afternoon sliding on their butts and bellies while the cleated shoes of the players from the military school allowed them to tack and dodge through Peninsula’s hapless defenses.  The assembled spectators, in their quest for entertainment, whooped and hollered in hilarity at the spectacle.  Final score, 13 – 1, a humiliation on our home field surpassing even the one on Bishop Johnson’s field.

I was miserable as Alimany and I drove back to our dwelling through the webs of mist clinging to the sodden landscape.  The air was chilly, and my flesh, stretched like a piano wire, between the absolute zero in my heart and the draught in the Renault, pebbled into the texture of coarse sandpaper.

As I climbed out of the Renault, Alimamy handed me a sealed envelope.   “I almost forgot, Mr. Livingston.  Kadiatu said to give this to you.”

I stuck it casually between the pages of one of the school texts I had brought home, then told Alimamy I would probably need his help cleaning up the mess I expected inside the house.

My footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the house as I walked through the anteroom into the living area.  Josh had taken off before the game for Freetown in the Jeep.  Water had puddled on the dining room floor and a slow, tedious drip still rapped on the dining table in the dying rhythm of a metronome that needed rewinding.  With months of dry season before us, Michelle, rather than the application of the roofing mastic, had usurped the spare time Josh might have given to patching the roof.

Dropping the exercise books and texts on the desk in my bedroom, I surveyed the damage done by the rain.  The floor was wet and the mattress on the bed damp, not because of any leaks from the roof but because I normally left the windows open during the day.

I sat down in the chair at my desk and opened the textbook that held Kadiatu’s envelope, recognizing at once her wretched penmanship in “Mr. Stephen Livingston” scrawled across the front.  Mentally, I chastised her indiscretion in making Alimamy the messenger.  I fully expected the letter would censure me for shaming her when I asked her to carry water that afternoon.  From previous confrontations in the classroom I knew she would not hold back when riled.  Her subsequent humiliation in front of Headmaster Clifford and the football players would have only agitated her more.  The actual contents of the letter, then, came as a total surprise:

Home, leisure time



Dear Stephen,

My heart is like a cabbage, divided into two,

The leaves I give to others, the heart I give to you.



I am quite sure you are in need of my particulars and they are as follows

Name: Kadiatu Ina Kainesse

Address: 9 Beccle Street, Brookfields

Date of birth: August 3rd, 1946

Hobbies: Kiss, dance and Romance.  What I mean is to do sexual intercourse but not all the time because I am a school girl.  I will send picture later.

The reason why I love you is that I was working in the garden of love and I saw a lovely rose, I took it and opened it and then I saw your name written in golden words saying that you should be the boy that I should be in love with.

I am your sweet until you are gone,

Kadiatu

It sounded like a mix of juvenile fantasy and job application.  And so unambiguously forthright: “what I mean is to do sexual intercourse.”  The words burned into my brain, searing it with apprehension, excitement, dread.

I surmised from the heading that the letter had been composed before the afternoon’s events at the football game.  Sitting there, absolutely dumbstruck by the revelations on the page, the depth of the humiliation I had caused her slowly took root in my consciousness.

© Gerald D. Mills, 2013