My Heart Is Like A Cabbage, Part 3 ~ Jerry Mills


PART III
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Luke 23:24
Chapter 19
Unknown to me or anyone else in the Peace Corps, we were fast approaching a November day of “infamy”—Roosevelt’s unforgettable phrase regarding the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  
So much of what had happened that mattered to my fellow Americans—during those months in 1962 when we were selected to be trained in New Paltz, New York, then went through the rigors of training, and finally began our adventure in Sierra Leone—was of less consequence to Peace Corps Volunteers, especially once we reached our destinations in so-called 3rd world countries.   Ron and I had enjoyed a subscription to Time magazine, which usually arrived one to two weeks late, but the events in America, beyond the “big pond” to the west, paled into insignificance in much the same way that events in Europe never seem to fully register in the consciousness of Americans.  And we were only vaguely aware that our country’s involvement in a conflict in some little country in Southeast Asia seemed to be escalating, as more and more “advisors” were being sent over there.  
1962 had been a banner year for American headlines: the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Glenn’s orbits around the earth which allowed Americans to hold up their heads once more in the cold war competition to conquer space.  James Meredith had enrolled in the University of Mississippi which set off rioting in the college town of Oxford.  Meanwhile, the ban on prayer in public schools began that year.  
Beatlemania had blasted off with “Love Me Do,” released close to the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Beatles along with the Rolling Stones became the spearhead of a “British invasion,” in America’s Rock and Roll scene.  Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” first performed in 1962, became the anthem of the civil libertarian movement, and his “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” was symbolically linked to the Cuban Missile Crisis despite Dylan’s denial.  The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring set in motion a growing awareness of the catastrophic impact the juggernaut of “progress” was having on our environment.  And the first Wal-Mart and K-Mart launched the beginning of “big-box” retail sales, a revolution in “business as usual” that would change America’s shopping habits. 
Yet here was I, transplanted to a “3rd world” order, where I scrambled along the learning curve of being immersed in an alien culture.  One of the biggest barriers to my assimilation into Sierra Leone’s various cultures was my American perception (endorsed by nearly all expatriates from highly industrialized nations) that assumed Africa’s culture had much catching up to do.  Ironically, at the same time, praise was lavished upon the uniqueness of its art, a la Picasso and Cubism, and its music.  
Certainly, Sierra Leone’s zeitgeist failed to abet the “progress” its leaders espoused.  Indolence seemed to be, if not a virtue, at least an antidote to the daily struggle to subsist in the tropics.  Those native to West Africa did not view it as the vice condemned in the adage my mother so often repeated to me as a child—“Idle  hands make work for the devil”—nor demonized as the “Sloth” of Catholicism’s Seven Deadly Sins.  And so expatriates often spoke amongst themselves in the pejorative of “African time,” meaning appointed clock times took a back seat to the slower ticking of the African mindset.  In Thoreau’s phrase, it was as if they heard a different drummer marking time.   The hammock, of course, became the disparaged symbol of this attitude.
Through ignorance (or arrogance) valuable lessons were often lost on us.  Litter provided an example, for other than biodegradable litter in the storm sewers of Freetown—banana peels, orange skins, peanut shells—trash was scarce in most villages of Sierra Leone: tin cans became drinking cups, old newsprint or brown wrapping paper was recycled to wrap bread from the baker or meat from the market, or used by the scholars to wrap their exercise and textbooks in.  Even the most ragged castoffs of clothing were recycled into children’s wear.  The tons of packaging, kitsch, toys, cars, appliances, and clothing that Americans cast off daily were not hauled off on barges or trucked to landfills.  To a close observer, which I was not, recycling was a way of life for most Africans.
Sometimes the differences seemed inconsequential.  Africans did not carry loads in their arms with the exceptions of the carry outs at major retail outlets in Freetown who assisted white ladies in getting their purchases to their cars.  Loads of nearly any kind were balanced on the head leaving the hands free.  If the load was very heavy or the distance it had to be carried long, a donut made of elephant grass placed atop the head helped to cushion it.  
Berating the African’s lack of “common sense” often fueled anecdotal narratives in conversation, one in particular, his knack for making minor repairs or changing tires in the middle of a highway.  But one day Ron and I came across a lorry which had a flat and, because there was neither a spare nor the means to inflate the “spoiled” tire, they simply compacted elephant grass into the deflated tire and went on their way.
One item common to all cultures is theft, but in Africa, the “tifman” had widespread notoriety, especially among white expatriates who regularly made this a topic of conversation at dinner parties and other social gatherings.  Stealing from “Europeans” or any other party who happened to be a member of the few “haves” as opposed to the legion “have nots,” accounted for the bars on windows, the metal entrance doors, the high chain-link fences, and those concrete walls with broken bottles cemented into the top edge to carve up the kneecaps of any who had the chutzpah to scale them.  Orville had to learn about the “tifman’s” prowess one day when he left his expensive camera on his desk beside an open window of the bungalow.  There were bars on the windows but the enterprising “tif” evidently used something, a coat hanger or stick perhaps, to hook the neck strap of the camera and draw it to his eager hands.  But appalled as we were by the African’s propensity to steal, we gave scant consideration to the notion that our conspicuous affluence in one of the poorest countries in the world might have been a contributing cause.
The most interesting image I have in my memory of a “tifing” incident, was the one where the Clifford’s young son, Gavin, one day caught a couple of urchins from Waterloo helping themselves to mangoes from a tree on the D.C.’s property.  The little man worked himself up into a red-faced fit of righteous indignation, chasing the “tifs” off our mountain.  Evidently, the five-year-old’s sense of “private property” and “ownership” had kicked in even at this tender age despite the fact this particular property rightfully belonged to the people of Sierra Leone, not to the Cliffords.
Litigation had become a highly regarded hand-me-down from colonial days, and the locals were forever taking one another to a nearby “court” where a chief or low-level bureaucrat would dispense justice.  Character defamation ranked high on the list of crimes—that and “woman damage.”  Men often encouraged their wives to seduce other men so they could collect damages in court.  Native courts provided an opportunity for considerable “palaver” and colorful insults, precursors of Judge Judy’s courtroom.  But at least no lawyers in Gucci lace-ups took away a third of either party’s settlement.
* * * * *
Josh decided he wanted to have his own “boy” to wash his clothes.  He was certain Alimamy was overburdened caring for the two of us, and the quarters beneath the house had enough room to accommodate two young men.  He had been approached by Santigie—not the little schoolboy who had elephantiasis, but the one who worked for the Cliffords.  The Cliffords had informed Santigie, Omaru and Kadiatu, that after the turn of the year their services would no longer be needed.  Even though assured the new principal would most likely keep them employed, Santigie had taken a liking to Josh and Josh to Santigie so the latter decided to jump ship early.  Josh asked if my paying for Alimamy’s services during July and August out of my monthly check had been a burden; I replied no, it had not.  Thus he reasoned he certainly would have no problem paying Santigie a similar amount.
I told Josh I certainly didn’t mind, but suggested he touch base with Malcolm, just as a courtesy, before sealing the deal.  Every time I thought of the Cliffords, now, I thought of Kadiatu’s letter.  I knew that, despite Malcolm’s reference to her as a “wench,” he harbored a paternal, albeit aloof, affection for her, however patriarchal or colonial its origins.  To become sexually involved with her would be a betrayal of the trust he had often shown in me.  I had to be careful: if not to avoid the guilt that would follow, at least to avoid the consequences of Malcolm’s wrath.  I had seen enough of his not so rational moments to fear becoming the target of one.  
However, as the ocean and atmospheric currents ushered in the dry season once again, Kadiatu’s declarations buzzed in my mind and my groin.  I still couldn’t believe her temerity: the confession of her desire to have sexual intercourse—with me!  Despite the dulcet lies I had whispered in Juliet’s ears, love and sex had been relegated to separate chambers in my relations with the fairer sex.  To Kadiatu, they appeared to be consubstantial.  
I also thought of Diane often, wondering where, in its transatlantic crossing, my letter might be.  As I pondered the images of our time together at Mizzou, I marveled at the chasteness of our relationship.  In the many scenarios my mind had played out of our relationship’s consummation, none had invaded the uncharted territory beyond a fully clothed embrace and kiss—however passionate.  Nowhere in my wildest fantasies had thoughts or mental pictures of sexual intimacy entered my mind.  When it came to sex, my mind was the child’s tabula rasa—as blank as turn of the century maps of uncharted Africa. 
It is no wonder I was quite surprised one day at school when Headmaster Clifford drew me aside to ask a favor: would I consider tutoring Kadiatu in English?  Part of my surprise arose from the fact that she was in his third form English class.
“I don’t know what’s happened to her.  I always thought she had potential, but lately she acts more like some moonstruck teenager, daydreaming in class, turning in mediocre work in that wretched handwriting of hers.  I thought about tutoring her myself, but Frida and I have so little time to prepare for our return to England, and I’m trying to tie up loose ends here at the school.”
“Well, I’m also kind of busy right now, especially after school.” A pathetic response, but on the spur of the moment and given the impulses warring in my mind, what else could I say?
“I understand that, what with the football team and all.  I’m just worried about whether she’ll pass the upcoming exams after I’m gone.  Incidentally, it was she who suggested you—in the evenings . . . if you had some free time, of course . . . she could walk down to your place.” 
My experience with Christiana had made me wary, and now that the loneliness and dire longing of my isolation during the rainy season had passed, caution seemed the order of the day.  I asked Clifford for a little more time to consider the matter.  I thought about suggesting Josh, but knew he was too preoccupied with Michelle to devote his spare time to tutoring Kadiatu.  I also felt that given her letter’s contents—which I had reread several times—such a situation would only complicate matters.
What about Orville?  We hadn’t seen much of Orville after school hours; in fact, we didn’t see much of him during the school day.  He disappeared from the school compound immediately after school let out.  After the episode in Freetown, I often thought of him up on the hill in the bungalow, passing endless hours alone just as I had done.  Even Josh wondered how he spent those hours by himself.  We knew, of course, he often dined with the Cliffords and that he was intent on finishing his thesis for the Master’s degree: “The Evolution of Transportation in Sierra Leone and Its Effects on Administrative Boundary Changes.”
The day after Clifford’s proposal that I tutor Kadiatu, I decided to pay Orville a visit—see what he was up to and what changes, if any, he had made in the bungalow.  As I made my way up the path through the forest, the images of the wet dream of a couple of weeks earlier came back to me.  The more I thought of it, the more I convinced myself that the woman by the stream had been Kadiatu.  Was such a coincidence possible?  
Coming out of the forest into the clearing in front of the bungalow, I saw the scar on the earth where I had labored to carve out a badminton court—best laid plans.  The rains had washed away the edge of the embanked side, depositing the soil in clumps on the court.  Nothing else had changed, though the grass that Samuel and later Alimamy had kept cut, was now overgrown.  The front door stood ajar.  Giving a perfunctory knock, I stepped inside, blinking as my eyes groped to see in the dim interior.
“Oh hi, Stephen.  Watch your step!”  It was Orville’s disembodied voice, but I couldn’t pick him out.  Spread at my feet and all across the floor were little stacks of 5 x 8 note cards.
“So you’re redoing the floor in index cards,” I said, making out a shadowy shape hunched over several cards in one corner of the room.  Orville appeared to have “painted” himself into a corner with these cards.
“My filing system,” he said smiling and standing up.  “What brings you up the hill?”
“Just wanted to see how you were settling in.”
“As you can see, my life is somewhat one dimensional,” he said, sweeping his arms over the cards.  “I didn’t hear a vehicle.  Did you walk?”
“Yes.  It’s been a while since I’ve hiked up the hill.  I see the rains have not been kind to my badminton court.” 
“So that’s what that is.  You’ve cleared up a mystery. ”
“A symbol of futility—trying to keep from going nuts when I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
“I think I can appreciate that.  Working on my thesis is tedious, but I’ve begun to recognize that having nothing to do but grade student papers would be worse.  Say, can I get you something to drink?”
“Sure.  What’ve you got?”
“Water, squash . . . I can make some iced tea if you want?”
“The last sounds good,” I said, tiptoeing through the maze of note cards as I followed him to the kitchen.
When he opened his refrigerator to get the water and ice cubes, I couldn’t believe what I saw.  Some of the shelves had been removed and in their place boxes of shredded wheat had been stacked alongside tins of Klim milk, jars of Bosco and peanut butter, boxes of Rye-Krisp, packages of dried prunes, instant pudding and some overripe bananas.  Obviously Orville, like his former mentor Malcolm Clifford, like all good Seventh Day Adventists of their day, had gone vegetarian.  But why was all of this crap in the refrigerator?
I looked at the screen wire food locker sandwiched between the sink and the refrigerator and noted that it was nearly empty as were the little tuna fish cans the legs stood in.  
“Why is all of this stuff in the refrigerator?  Most of it isn’t going to spoil. Why don’t you put it in the bloody food locker?”  Spicing my expression with a little British profanity always seemed harmless—I mean how obscene could “blood” be?
“What food locker?”
“That food locker,” I said, pointing at the wood and screen-wire structure next to the fridge.
He grinned.  “I thought that was some kind of animal pen or something.  The Cliffords warned me about insects in Africa: I just wanted to keep the ants from getting to the food.”
“That’s what the empty tuna cans are for—you’re supposed to keep them filled with water.  The screen wire is to keep out the flying insects.  And, anyway, what self-respecting insect would want to dine on shredded wheat?”
After that remark, Orville busied himself making the iced tea.  I learned from my first experience in Freetown that he suffered smart-ass remarks by withdrawing into a shell of self-imposed silence.  As much as I enjoyed rubbing his nose in the realities of living in Africa, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy.  There was something compelling about his genuine innocence.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he nodded.  “There’s a lot I have to learn about living out here, but I’m always so busy with this darned thesis.  Why don’t we go sit on the front porch?”
We sat in silence on the porch for a couple of minutes, sipping our tea.  A fly began pestering Orville, which made him jump from his seat immediately to retrieve a swatter from inside the house.  “Darn flies.  I hate them . . . I’m always afraid they might be tsetses.  I sure don’t want to get sleeping sickness.”
“I had the same fear last year.  When I first arrived, I devoted half my time to killing flies.  My roommate told me the tsetse is not as prevalent in Sierra Leone, especially in the Colony mountains area, as it is in Central Africa.  But that wasn’t much comfort.”
“How do you tell the tsetse from an ordinary fly?”
“I’m not really sure.  I’ve heard the tsetse is larger; I’ve also heard that’s not necessarily so—that you have to look at how the wings are folded when they light on something.”
“Gosh, you’d think with all the insects flying around—and some of them carrying deadly diseases—they’d at least have screens on the windows.”
“I felt the same way, but you’ll have to go to the Adventist compound in Bo to find screens on windows.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Yes.  The Knudsens invited me up during the rains when I was down with malaria.”
“You had malaria?”
“I’m not positive; I never had a blood test.  But the symptoms matched.”
Orville’s face had grown more blanched than usual.  “You’re taking malaria pills, aren’t you?”  He nodded.  “As long as you sleep under mosquito netting at night, I don’t think you have to worry.  I probably caught mine on a camping trip in the Loma Mountains.  We didn’t have any netting.”
“Where are the Loma Mountains?”
“Way to hell and gone (pardon my French) in the eastern part of Sierra Leone.  Very remote.”
“Gosh, that must have been an adventure.”
“Too much adventure.  Sleeping under the stars in a remote part of Africa is definitely not my cup of tea.”
“Did you see any wild animals?”
“Baboons.”
“Really?”
“Really.  I heard you lost your camera to the tifman.  Mine was nearly carried off by a baboon.”
“Holy cow!”
“We had just been through a soaking downpour and all our things were wet.  None of us had raingear because it was still the dry season and, naturally, we didn’t expect rain.  We camped near a small stream and there was a huge outcrop of boulders about two hundred feet away, so I spread all my stuff out on the boulders to dry and returned to the camp.  Next thing I knew this troop of baboons was going through my stuff.  One of them picked up the strap on the camera, and began swinging it around.  Luckily, he lost interest in it and put it down.”
“Wow!”
Just then five young ladies with bundles of firewood on their heads came down the path alongside the bungalow.  It brought back memories of the past year.  They were laughing and giggling just as they had done when Ron and I lived there, turning their heads with their loads ever so slightly to steal a glance at us.
Orville watched them with keen interest.  “Did this happen most afternoons when you lived here?”
“You bet.”
“Did they always seem amused like that when they passed by?”
“I used to think I was the object of their laughter.”
“Me too . . . I always wonder what’s going through their minds.”
“You may be the equivalent of a Rock Star to them.”  I got up from my seat and held up my empty glass.  “Where do you want this?”
“I’ll take it.  You have to go?”
“Yeah, I’ve got papers to grade and it’s my turn to fix dinner.  By the way, would you be interested in tutoring Kadiatu?  Malcolm said she needs help with her English.”
“He asked me already.  I told him I really didn’t have time while I’m trying to complete my thesis.  My writing isn’t all that great anyway.”
Orville, I was discovering was a likeable fellow.  Not always candid, but certainly sincere.  Easy to talk to—easier than Josh, for Josh seldom asked questions.  Orville’s questions gave me the ego-boosting comfort that my first year’s experience had counted for something—that my new knowledge had value to someone.
At the bottom of the steps, I turned to offer an unsolicited piece of advice.  “Say, I don’t want to scare you or anything, but I noticed you keep both the kitchen and front doors open.”
“Yes,” he said. “It gets so stuffy in the house.”  
“Well, might I recommend keeping them closed?  Last year we discovered another resident in the garage—a spitting cobra.  You wouldn’t want him entering as an uninvited guest.”
“A what?”  Orville’s eyes widened.
“Spitting cobra—it’s a cobra whose fangs are somehow hinged so he can direct the venom at his victim’s eyes—up to five or more feet—it can cause temporary blindness.” 
“You’ve got to be kidding!” 
“I’m sorry.  Wish I was.  He squirted at me last year when I tried to corner him in the garage; luckily, I was far enough away the venom didn’t reach me.”
“Oh, my gosh!” he exclaimed, looking in the direction of the side door entrance to the garage at the end of the porch.
“Just be careful,” I said.  “It may no longer be there, but I wouldn’t take any chances, especially when you are engrossed in your research on the floor.”  But seeing the look on his face, I began to wonder if this had been sound advice or simply one more straw loaded on the camel’s back.
* * * * *
The evening of November 22, 1963, remains fixed forever in memory.  I need no snapshots or journal entry to remind me of my date with Ms. Conte, Peninsula’s French teacher:  our impatient wait in the auditorium’s lobby, the pastel-green gown she wore, her laughter, my fevered ego stoked by the lovely woman on my arm while I plotted a strategy to end our first date with a kiss.  It all seemed so gloriously surreal only to come crashing to earth, sucked into life’s gravitation pull by the news from beyond West Africa—President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated—another blot on the parable of a democracy not yet two hundred years old and not quite one hundred years after one of its most celebrated Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, had been shot.
The news of Kennedy’s June 26thIch bin ein Berliner” speech, as well as the widening reputation of Camelot abroad had never reached me, preoccupied as I was with my personal angst during the 1963 rainy season.  Living in the relative isolation of Waterloo, Sierra Leone, only vaguely familiar with the remarkable chain of events that had occurred in the first three years of the Kennedy administration—the worldwide impact of the Peace Corps, a new direction for racial relations in the U.S., John Glenn’s orbits of the earth, the Cuban Missile Showdown—I had no understanding of how JFK had become not just another American President in the eyes of the world but had been elevated to embody the hopes of millions who had lived under the shadow of Armageddon for nearly twenty years.  No understanding even as I saw Ms. Conte’s tears and her “Please accept my sympathy,” those first tremors of the imminent media earthquake that would throw so much of the world into mourning.
Meanwhile, that evening a small band of Peace Corps Volunteers in Freetown, Sierra Leone, would go ahead with their plans to have a party, another of life’s insignificant ironies so  readily deconstructed yet never fathomed.



Chapter 20


It is a measure of so much that Josh and I took for granted, or perhaps our own self-imposed distance from all things African, that we knew so little about the night watchman’s family who occupied the tiny outbuilding behind our dwelling.  I had not learned his name or his origins, so embroiled was I in my own futile attempts to carve out a piece of the U.S.A. in Sierra Leone’s alien environment. Some said he was from Guinea, others thought he might be a Sherbro from the Bonthe district, where cannibalism was said to have been practiced by the Human Leopard and Human Alligator societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  His facial features, as well as his stature, set him apart from the average citizen of Waterloo.  He spoke some Krio, but in accents that made it even more difficult to understand.

Short in stature, built like a fireplug, he made his nightly rounds passing under my window, machete in hand.  During the day he catnapped and kept mostly to himself, as did his wife, a tall, willowy woman who had just given birth to a baby boy before we moved in and seemed to spend most of her waking hours nursing.  Alimamy and Santigie informed us that the villagers feared our diminutive watchman.  The two of them addressed him respectfully as simply “Pa.”  

His oldest daughter, however, made a contrasting impression.  She had her mother’s long, attractive legs, and I guessed her to be about 11 or 12—going on 16.  Her name was Fudia, and she already had the guileful demeanor of an older woman, a languorous, seductive way of posing at the bottom of the staircase which led up to the kitchen at the rear of our house.  The bodice of the dress she wore after school was torn, baring one of the small buds that would soon ripen into the fruit of womanhood.  In her nonchalance, one might think her oblivious to the temptress she was becoming.  But not her father.  Whenever he saw her posing on the steps, he ran her off; her mother, however, seemed to deliberately ignore these incursions upon our staircase and often she and her husband argued after he had scolded the girl and driven her back to the stifling confines of their own cramped dwelling.  Mother and daughter persevered, however, because as the days passed, I noticed the young lady struck her pose higher and higher on our staircase. 

As Josh’s relationship with Michelle grew more intense, he seemed to become increasingly unmindful about circumstances at the house and school.  Like Ron, he commandeered the Jeep on weekends, and after school let out on Fridays took off for Freetown.  He had befriended Nolan, and since Nolan’s two new roommates were buddies from the third group of Volunteers sent to Sierra Leone, he generally camped out on their living room couch.  I didn’t protest this presumptive use of the Jeep to pursue his courtship of Michelle, for there was always the Renault gathering dust in the garage, though I was still leery about driving it to Freetown.  

I quickly learned, after a couple of trips to Freetown with Josh, that when the weekend ended, his final parting from Michelle could drag on forever.  We would drive over to her place about eight p.m. Sunday evenings; the three of us talked for awhile, then started down the steps as if to leave.  I would walk around the corner to the Jeep to give them privacy only to sit in the dark for nearly thirty minutes wondering how a goodbye could drag on so long.

Nolan and I began to drift apart.  On one of those weekends I had traveled with Josh, I told Nolan of the letter Kadiatu had written.  I had been dying to share its contents with someone but still was not comfortable enough with Josh to share it with him.

“Why don’t you fuck her?  She obviously wants it,” Nolan said.

“Who?”  I said, knowing full well who.  The blunt obscenity of the question simply took me by surprise. 

“The black chick . . . your student,” he said impatiently.
“I’m not going to ‘fuck’ her.”
“Why not? . . . You’re scared, aren’t you.”
“Hell yes, I’m scared.  Screwing the principal’s protégée?  And just where would I do this?”
“You know what they say—where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
But to my now-cautious reasoning this was simply a bridge too far.  I remembered the fiasco with Juliet, and the dread I experienced after that evening with Christiana.  If those secrets ever got back to Clifford, my days at Peninsula would be numbered.  
* * * * *
Josh and I arrived at the school a little earlier than usual, totally out of character for a Monday morning.  Something had happened, for we found the campus already astir at 7:30.  A police Land Rover was parked alongside Clifford’s Vauxhall in the school lot.   A officer stood at attention beside the entrance to the Headmaster’s office, and the metal door to the office was bent out of shape and hanging by one hinge.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Clifford said, with a grin amped by more mockery than any I had yet witnessed.  He introduced us to another gentleman in the office, the Waterloo Police Inspector.  Mr. Koker stood by the filing cabinet, a portrait of dejection.
“It seems we were visited last night by the ‘tifman’,” Clifford quipped.
“What’s missing?” Josh asked.
“That’s what we are trying to determine,” Clifford said, glancing askance at Koker.  “It’s obvious a few new textbooks and exercise manuals are missing.  The safe was moved slightly from its usual spot, but of course he or they weren’t able to do much with it.”
You could sense in his telling that he was withholding something, amusing himself at Koker’s expense, who was squirming under Clifford’s glare.
“We were lucky, then,” I said.
“We might have been,” Malcolm said evenly.  “However, I left seventy pounds with Mr. Koker to pay for the building materials that were supposed to have been delivered Friday.  That money is gone.  Mr. Koker is attempting to reconstruct his memory of events on Friday for us.”
The Inspector, certain that the introductory civilities had been sufficiently concluded, turned to Koker.  “You say you aren’t certain whether you put the money in the safe or left it in the desk drawer Friday night.”
“That is correct,” replied Koker, whom I had never seen sweat before.  He had half moons of moisture at his underarms and beads on his face.  His voice was keyed half an octave above normal, close to a whine, and he rubbed the sweat from his forehead forcibly with a handkerchief.  
“You see,” he said, declaiming, “it was very dark . . . very dark in the place when I left.  I was rushing about the office; my wife would be worried because the time was late.  The money was in the drawer of the desk, and I was going to put it in the safe.  This is all very confusing . . . a most grave disaster.”
“Why did you have the money out of the safe?” Clifford shot back.  
“Yes, well you see . . . I was writing, here at the desk . . . like this,” and he went through a dumb show of gestures to create the image.  Clifford rolled his eyes upward as if to say, “Can you just get to the point?”
“Pa Dumbya came in there,” Koker pointed at the only door.  “He was telling me you had not paid him for last month’s work.  He was in need of money . . . he is saying his wife was sick.”
“So you took the money from the safe to pay Pa Dumbya.  Is that what you’re trying to tell us?”  Clifford had drawn blood: the interrogation had finally cut through the insolence Koker had used for so long to disguise his fragile ego.
“Yes . . . yes!”  Koker’s voice broke.  “You see, the man looked poorly.  I could not tell if he is telling lies.”  
“So let me be clear about this,” the Inspector spoke up.  “You opened the safe.”
“Yes—to get the money for the Pa.”  Koker’s hands opened in supplication, the white palms unfolding like the petals of a flower.
“Mr. Koker,” Clifford said sternly, “in the first place, I left the money in your care with specific instructions.  It was to be used, and I emphasized this, only to pay for the building materials.  The payment of Pa Dumbya’s salary is solely my responsibility.  Secondly, it was extremely foolhardy of you to open the safe in the presence of anyone!”
“Very foolish,” the Inspector chimed in.
The interruption did not affect the rhythm of Clifford’s perfectly integrated attempt to discredit Koker’s story.  I felt like cheering, for I was witnessing Koker receiving a long overdue  comeuppance.  I also marveled that Headmaster Clifford was delivering this dressing-down to a fellow Adventist.  
“Finally,” Clifford said, pushing back from his desk to stand for the first time, “I see no reason for you to have withdrawn the seventy pounds from the safe.  A pound from your own pocket would have tided the man over until this morning when he could bring his complaint to me.”
“But I was having no money,” Koker said miserably, yet with a hint of the old festering insolence.
“Then you should have politely informed Pa Dumbya he would have to wait—that you had no authority to dole out school money to him,” Clifford retorted harshly.
Koker blinked in astonishment.  The proceedings had shifted the sands beneath him from the fact of the theft—as if his own sins of omission were the very heart of the crime.  The Inspector asked a few more perfunctory questions, then bid us good-day.  Koker followed him from the office without being dismissed, badgering the Inspector with his pleas.  
“That imbecile,” Clifford said, as he stared at the retreating figures through the bars on the windows.  “I should have dismissed him last year.  Pedar Knudsen wanted me to keep him because he’s one of the church elders.  He’s also a hypocrite and a lazy fool.”
“Is he claiming he doesn’t remember whether he put the money back in the safe?” I asked.
“A bit flimsy, isn’t it?  I knew I should have left the money with one of you two, but we were informed that’s against Peace Corps policy.  Why, when the institutions of this country are so pressed for responsible manpower, the Peace Corps doesn’t want its Volunteers entrusted with authority is beyond me.  I suppose Washington wants to remain absolved of the indelicacies of this kind of mess.”
“Is seventy pounds so much?” Josh asked.
“No, seventy pounds is not so much by the standards you two are accustomed to.  But it’s seventy pounds I can’t pick off the mango trees.  I don’t have a shilling left to pay for those building materials if they come today.  I’ll have to wire Pedar and see if the mission can advance the school the money.”
During football practice that week, Alimamy appeared listless.  Usually, he made up for his lack of natural ball handling talent with aggressive defense.  When he gave me some lip after I called a foul on a play, he glared at me momentarily.  After practice, however, he came to my office in the science lab and apologized.  He stood there in the doorway, looking dejected, as if he wanted to say something more, but then turned to go.
Concerned because he had become increasingly apathetic both in the classroom and around the house, I called to him.
“What is it Alimamy?”
He stopped and turned to look at me, then said quietly, “Nothing, sir.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded and then left quietly.
However, after dinner that night he came to me while I was washing dishes.  He asked if he could talk to me privately, so we went to my bedroom and I closed the door.
“What’s the trouble?”
“It’s Mr. Koker, sir.”
“What about Mr. Koker?”
“He is telling lies on me in the school.  Not only the school but also the village.”
“What kind of lies?”  I could tell from the expression on his face that he was struggling to control the anger boiling inside.
“He is saying I am the one who took the money from Headmaster Clifford’s office.”
“What?”  It hadn’t occurred to me that our little barnyard rooster would invent something like this to take the pressure off himself.  “That little pipsqueak,” I muttered under my breath.
“Sir?”
“Nothing. . . . How could he possibly accuse you?”
“He is after saying I took the money Sunday—that I am being the only one besides Pa Dumbya that saw the money.”
“Were you in the office Sunday?”
“Yes sir,” he replied, eyes downcast.  “I went to buy a Mathematics book for class.”
“At this late date?”
“Please sir, I have been using Christiana’s book.  She is in the morning with Mr. Awodele.  I have his class in afternoon.  This week he say everyone must have a book.  But Christiana is not coming to school all week, and I have no book.”
“What’s wrong with Christiana?” I asked, recalling I hadn’t seen her in my classes either.
“They are saying she had the belly.  She is not wanting this pikin.  She would be having to leave school.”
“Abortion?”
“They are bringing the child too soon.  She lost much blood.  They are saying she is very sick.”
Poor Christiana.  Thank God I hadn’t succumbed to her invitation from the back of the Jeep the night of our little tryst.
“You were in the office, then, on Sunday?”
“Yes sir.  Please, sir, I am not seeing the Pa.  There was only Mr. Koker.”
“Do you know what time it was?”
“No, sir.  I am not having the time.”
“Did you see the money?”
“I am not seeing any money.  Mr. Koker is telling lies.  The man is very bad.  In Prep Class he was telling everyone I have witched him.”
“Witched?”
“Yes, sir.”  A repressed smile stole across Alimamy’s lips at the memory of Koker’s preposterous suggestion.  “This man is very foolish.  He should not be a master in secondary school.  The boys are saying people of the village laugh at Peninsula when they are knowing Mr. Koker teaches.  The police Inspector laughs at Mr. Koker.”
Alimamy paused a few seconds.  “Mr. Livingston, I want to be taking this man to court for his lies.”
“Would you?”
“Please, sir, I have no money.  A scholar cannot win.  The court is very slow and they are favoring the older man over the scholar.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I do not know,” he said resignedly.  He had paused again, then, as if testing the water, said, “I was after thinking you could tell Mr. Koker you would take him to court.  He is afraid of the white man.  He knows they have the money to win in court.”
“You want me to take Koker to court?”
“No, sir.  It is only for blohf.”
“For blohf?”  
“Yes, Mr. Livingston . . . you know, like for show.  He will be telling no more lies if he hears you want to take him to court where he will be sure to lose.”
“Ah, a bluff.”  I pondered the possible ramifications of such a ploy.  “I don’t know.  The Peace Corps does not want us to get involved in situations like this.  Threatening a man with court might bring bad publicity.  Besides, I don’t know much about African courts.”
“But it is only to say for blohf, sir.”
“But what if Mr. Koker finds out we are only bluffing?”
“He is a foolish man.  He will be afraid.”
The new Assistant Rep., John Berkley, had been an attorney before signing on with the Peace Corps.  I decided I would consult him even though I feared his response would be tepid at best.
“Let me talk to some people in Freetown before we do anything,” I said.
My premonitions about consulting the Peace Corps bureaucracy proved correct: the discussion with John was fruitless.  Based on what he had heard, cases of slander were nightmares in Africa.  I tried to explain to him the “bluff” aspect, but the more he talked the more his timidity surfaced and began annoying me even though I had rather expected his position.  He gave me a parting mini-lecture about the Peace Corps’ tenuous stature and accorded privileges in Sierra Leone and, thus, our responsibility to safeguard these with extreme discretion.  Since I had told him of the interrogation of Mr. Koker by Malcolm Clifford, he suggested that I might have an ally there.  I should consider discretely informing the Headmaster of the situation—strictly in confidence, of course.  I left his office wondering why I had wasted the trip to his office.  John, it seemed, was one of those career government bureaucrats who considered the Corps an escalator to a State Department position.
The following morning I dropped into Clifford’s office to explain Alimamy’s situation.  It quickly chased away his customary Cheshire smile.
“Hmmm.  Going to be difficult to discover just who’s lying, isn’t it?  But I believe you may be a little too close to Alimamy to be objective about this.  I’ve noticed you seem inclined to favor the word of scholars over adults, though can’t say I blame you.  Koker’s a rascal alright, and lazy.  But I really doubt he would lie about a thing like this.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that he was lying, just being a bit presumptuous.  He shouldn’t be slandering a young boy’s reputation without evidence.”
“And you assume there is no evidence?”
“Why not ask Mr. Koker if he has any?” I said, a little too heatedly.
So we left the matter at that.  Clifford said he’d have a word with Koker and then get back to me.  I had little time in the following days to reflect on our meeting.  The date of Peninsula’s rematch with Bishop Johnson was fast approaching.  I had managed to instill some semblance of team discipline in our practices by wooing the players with promises of cleated shoes, knee socks. and jerseys.  The eleven players who attended practice faithfully would be outfitted in this attire.
Practice began with running.  Bishop Johnson had a much larger talent pool to draw from for us to think of outplaying them man to man.  I decided to emphasize endurance and teamwork, two qualities decidedly absent from our previous matches.  I tried to shame them into running before practice by running along with them, but they were only briefly impressed by my effort to break through that invisible barrier that separates the behavior of school masters and scholars.  After running, we played a game I invented which nearly brought on a mutiny: playing volleyball using only the head and feet—no hands allowed.  I had noticed their aversion to heading the ball, not only our players but also the teams we had played.  Perhaps this might give us an edge.  The first afternoon we tried the experiment, I quickly had to retrieve the school’s meager supply of APC tablets.
We devoted most of the practice to moving the ball from player to player.  I set ten second limits on dribbling, then seven, then five; they were allowed only twenty seconds to move the ball from one end of the field to the other.  Then we went to work on holding our offensive and defensive positions.  To simplify things, I asked them to think of the letter W—they were to hold their positions in that formation as they moved up and down the field.  When someone broke the pattern, he had to watch for a few minutes from the sidelines.
One morning after worship, Clifford took me aside into his office.  “I’ve had a little talk with Mr. Koker.”
“And?”
“I’m afraid you’re not going to like this.  He appears to have that evidence you were wanting.”
“He brought Joseph in here yesterday afternoon.  The boy swears he saw Alimamy on the school grounds the night of the theft after Mr. Koker had gone home.  He also claims Alimamy was spending more pocket money around Waterloo after that night.”
“But I had just paid him his month’s salary.  What with trying to get together enough money to buy equipment for the football team, I had to put off paying him until my Peace Corps check came in.”
“Can you explain his appearance on the school grounds that night?”
The prosecutorial detachment in his voice began to unnerve me. “Explain?  Certainly I can offer an explanation.  You know as well as I that Joseph is related to Mr. Koker.  They’re two peas in the family pod: indolent and self-serving, willing to stoop to anything to save their own skins!”
“Joseph is willing to swear to this.”
“Joseph would swear to anything.  Do you really think that an Englishman’s oath, or laying a hand on the Bible, means to Joseph or Mr. Koker what it means to you or me?”
“I am well aware our values are not held in quite the same esteem by Africans.  But, in this instance, like any other, there are certain indices that lend more credibility to one person’s word over another’s.  Joseph was raised in an Adventist home environment.  He is one of the most faithful and dedicated young people in our Waterloo congregation.  It was I who encouraged Orville to hire him to help with the chores Orville doesn’t have time to get to while putting together his thesis.  Alimamy, on the other hand, appears to have no spiritual allegiance—even to the Muslim faith which he supposedly is a member of.  I haven’t mentioned this before, but back when Alimamy was a member of our first Prep class, Mr. Koker discovered he had been wenching with one of the village whores, and—“
“Did Koker tell you he accused Alimamy of witching him?”
Clifford looked surprised.  “No.  I must confess I never heard that.  But the point is that Alimamy did own up to the fact that he had been consorting with a woman in the village.”
“Well, that should be a point in his favor—his willingness to confess to the truth.  Alimamy will be nineteen shortly.  He was what—nearly sixteen in Prep?  Don’t boys of that age have sexual urges?”
“The point, my dear boy, is that the only thing separating us from the chimps in the hills is our ability to suppress these promptings when they violate the Lord’s commandments and besmirch that image in whose likeness we are made.”
Christ, I thought.  Now a lecture on evolution.  How do you talk intelligently to a fanatic, even a highly educated one, when he speaks ex cathedra from faith and his beliefs?  A week earlier Clifford had come down on Koker as an imbecile, culpable of, if not theft, at least prodigal stupidity.  Now, he had been welcomed back into the amazing grace fold.  
“I’ve decided to have a short hearing this afternoon after school is over.  I have a few questions which Alimamy may well have answers to.  It’s about time we looked into this a little further.”
“Suits me,” I said.  “Where?”
“In the Home Economics classroom.  You don’t have to come if you’re busy with football practice.”
“But I want to.”
That afternoon I ran the perimeter of the field a couple of times with the players, then put the young man we had recruited from Hastings in charge of practice.  I was out of breath when I entered the room adjacent to the science lab.
Nearly the entire staff, even Orville, was assembled in the room, a surprise to me for I had expected a small gathering of the principals involved in the controversy—Alimamy, Koker, Joseph, and Clifford.  Only Josh, who had gone to Freetown, wasn’t there.  The seating arrangement suggested a variation on some kind of Kangaroo Court was in process.  Alimamy and Joseph were seated side-by-side in a lonely space cleared between the blackboard and the front row of desks.  Somehow I had misconstrued Clifford’s use of the word “hearing.”
For a moment the room became silent as I stood, somewhat dazed, in the doorway.  The size of the gathering and the exertion of running conspired to pump the blood into my face.  My head felt perilously balanced on my neck, ready to topple from its perch atop my spine at a moment’s misstep.
“Won’t you come in, Mr. Livingston?” Clifford’s voice was obliging but formal.
The Africans in the room, with the exception of Alimamy, studiously avoided my gaze as I walked to an empty chair.  Clifford had evidently been questioning Joseph when I entered, for he took up the thread of his interrogation again.
“Joseph, you say you saw Alimamy on the school grounds the night of the theft?”
“Yes sir.”
“And how is it you came to be on the school grounds that night?”
Joseph squirmed, appearing reluctant to answer the question.
“Answer Headmaster Clifford’s question,” Mr. Koker urged from his chair.  
Joseph answered in a barely audible voice.  “I was after visiting my uncle on the road to York.”
“Speak up, boy!” Koker commanded this time, prompting a glare from Clifford.
“I needed to use the loo . . . at the school.”
A low murmur of mirth swirled through the room.  A red flag went up immediately in my mind.  What African male would choose the school toilets over the side of the road, especially at night? 
“But you said it was dark,” Clifford continued.  “How were you able to tell it was Alimamy in the dark?”
Joseph appeared confused for a moment and glanced over at Mr. Koker.  “He was carrying a lantern, sir.  I could see it was Alimamy.”
“Please, Mr. Clifford—” Alimamy tried to break in.
“Not now, Alimamy.  You will have your turn to talk.”
Another red flag!  What thief would be carrying a lantern to carry out his dark deed?
“Are there any more questions from any of you for Joseph before we move on to Alimamy’s story of that night’s events?”
Clifford quickly regretted this courtesy to the assembled staff, for each was anxious to demonstrate his or her skills at cross-examination.  So Joseph had to elaborate in tiresome detail various parts of his testimony again.  It was all so insidiously inane, for those details in Joseph’s reconstruction of events that had raised red flags in my mind appeared to go unnoticed.  I wanted badly to rush to Alimamy’s defense, but feared my temper would get the best of me.  Surely, Clifford would call attention to the weaknesses in Joseph’s narrative.
Just then he broke into Ms. Conte’s questions.  “Right-O, I think we’ve successfully established the particulars of Joseph’s testimony about that night.  I believe you have a bus to catch, isn’t that right, Ms. Conte?”
“Yes, Mr. Clifford,” she said, pouting.
“Very well, then.  I would like to clear up one more thing, for Mr. Livingston’s benefit, before we move on.”  He turned to me.  “We covered this matter before you arrived, but it won’t hurt to go over it again.  
“Now, about the money you saw Alimamy with in town.  Could you tell us about that again, Joseph?”
“Last Wednesday, Mr. Eversole is sending me to buy rice from the market in Waterloo.  I am stopping at the house of Mr. Livingston and Mr. Johnston to ask Alimamy and Santigie if they want to go to the village.  They say they will come.  When we get to the market, I am noticing that Alimamy has many pound notes.”
“How many pounds would you say?” Clifford asked.
“I am not able to tell for certain.  I saw many.”
Clifford turned to me.  “Mr. Livingston, how much did you pay Alimamy . . . Tuesday was it?”
“Fifteen pounds—his monthly salary.”
“Yes.  Just checking.  For a schoolboy, Alimamy, you must live quite handsomely, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Please sir—” 
“—never mind,” Clifford broke in.  “Well now, Joseph, would you say Alimamy had more than fifteen pounds?”
“Yes sir.”
“How much would you say he had?”
“Please sir, I was not having time to count.  I saw many notes.”
“Very well, then,” Clifford said as he turned to the staff.  “Are there any more questions that might bring out more pertinent information.”
Members of staff were silent this time.  They had divined Clifford’s growing impatience in his use of the word “pertinent.”
“Then let’s proceed to Alimamy.  Joseph, you may wait outside until you are called again.”
As Joseph rose to leave, I could contain myself no longer.  
“Why shouldn’t he stay?” I blurted in frustration.  “For heaven’s sake, Alimamy had to sit and listen to this young man’s version of events!  Why shouldn’t Joseph have to do the same.”
It was a moot point, to be sure, but vexed as I was by the whole proceeding, I could think of nothing else at the moment.
“This would not be right,” Ms. Cummings-John said icily.
“Why the hell wouldn’t it be right?”  I had lost it; “hell” doubled the impact of my sudden discourtesy.
Ms. Cummings-John’s lips and brow knitted in scorn.  “Joseph is not the one accused.  He should go from the room.”  
“What’s the sense in that?”  
“The testimony of a witness is always given first at a trial.”
“Trial?  I thought this was a ‘hearing’—an attempt to get more information about what happened Sunday night.”  My voice quivered.  “How is it that Alimamy is suddenly on trial here?  I see no judge, no jury, no counsels representing Alimamy.  You seem to be intent on simply getting this boy to incriminate himself in front of you.”
“It is the right way, the way it is done at the grammar schools in Freetown,” Ms. Conte suddenly interjected.
Et tu, Brute?  Funny how quickly a relationship with a woman could deteriorate.  I remembered how Ron went off on Conte the previous year.  My head seemed to be lolling in all directions, like a bobble-head doll, about to careen from its axis and go bouncing across the floor.  I tried, valiantly but unsuccessfully, to close the valve pumping adrenaline throughout my body.
“Who cares what the grammar schools in Freetown do?  This is not a grammar school, and it is certainly not a courtroom.  When did schools ever take it upon themselves to solve a crime as serious as this—the door to the Headmaster’s office nearly pried off its hinges, and seventy pounds missing?  This is a court case.  What right do any of you have,” and I tried to sweep the room with my palsied arm, “prying into this matter?”
“Mr. Livingston—” Clifford tried to intervene, but Ms. Cummings-John’s eyes were seething with indignation, pop-eyed from my tirade.
“Just who do you Peace Corps think you are, coming in here and taking over everything—that’s what I’d like to know.”
I thought I heard a murmur of agreement swelling through the room.  Orville’s face was turning red.
“We do not take orders from you.  I do not take orders from your foul mouth.  One year you have been in Sierra Leone and you think you know how everything should be done—you want to change the way we have done everything since long before you were born.”
“Ms. Cummings-John—”
“Please excuse, Headmaster Clifford, but I am not finished.”  She was sniffling now.  Orville, who had recently made overtures of friendship to her, looked woefully in my direction and then at her.
“I do not have to sit and listen to this man make ridicule of me.  I may not have as much education as he does; I do not have a degree from a college in the United States, but I don’t have to be bossed by him.”
“What does my education have to do with this?” I said.  “It’s plain common sense; it’s     . . . justice I’m talking of.”
“Justice—justice?  What do you know of justice in Africa?” she half-shouted and half-sobbed.
Clifford rose to his feet, ready to assert his authority as Headmaster, but Cummings-John was already out of hers.
Puffed up like some corpulent toad, she continued to ooze venom.  “You . . . who do you think you are yelling and swearing in our presence, pointing at us?  Your behavior is disgraceful.  Have you no manners?”
“Please, Ms. Cummings-John, sit down,” Clifford pleaded.
“Yeah, why don’t you shut your face?” I said under my breath.
“What did you say to her?” Ms. Conte said, rising to her feet.
“Ms. Conte, Ms. Cummings-John, will you please take your seats?” Clifford said sternly.
By now I was like some small lap dog egged on by the bravado of its own barking.  I pointed a menacing but shaking finger at Conte.  “I’ll talk to her anyway I please!”
“Well,” Conte exhaled, summoning the eyes of the assembled staff, “Did you see that?  This . . . this Peace Corps has the manners of the gutter.  Even women who sell fish do not point like that.”
“It is very bad,” Koker agreed sagely, very subdued by this spectacle of feminine wrath.
“Perhaps, if we would all just sit down and—”
But with toad bladder fully inflated, Ms. Cummings-John was a formidable force.  “You Peace Corps come to Sierra Leone and think you know everything.  But the real reason that you are here,” pointing at me this time, “ is because you have unemployment in America.  They can’t find jobs for you there, so they send you to Africa to take away our jobs.”
“So that’s the nasty little secret you’ve been hiding behind that phony smile all this time.  I’ve been working my butt off here at Peninsula—a year before you arrived, I might add—giving two years of my life to help this country catch up with the rest of the world, and you think I’m here because I can’t find a better job in the United States?”
“So why don’t you go back to your precious United States of America if you think we are so backwards?  What are you doing here anyway?  We don’t need your pity.”
“Alright!” I said, storming to my feet.  “I’m outta here.”
“Mr. Livingston, please!  We all appreciate what you’ve done for Peninsula.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Clifford, but I’m afraid you’re speaking only for yourself.  I’ve had it with the likes of these two,” I said, thumbing Cummings-John and Conte.
That parting shot drew more outcries from both of them as I slammed the door.  Flooring the accelerator, I peeled out of the parking lot in a red cloud of dust, driving the Renault as if hell-bent through the slow-reacting crowd at the intersection.  Women with baskets on their heads stepped into the ditch as I sped by, and a couple of young toughs standing alongside a lorry gave me menacing glares.
The engine of the Dauphine whined in pain as I played back what had just happened.  I tried to tally all the bridges I had burnt in the heat of the moment.  I had played the fool by losing my cool.  Had a year in Africa done this to me?  Yet the grievous affront of both Ms. Conte and Ms. Cummings-John’s remarks cut deeply.  Had the feelings they expressed about my presence in Sierra Leone been lying in ambush all this time, ready to strike at that moment when the thin veneer of civility was suddenly stripped away?  
Worst of all, my parting threat to leave Peninsula.  Was I serious?  Could I really do that, and where would I go?  What would I do?  But the deed was done.  How could I save face now if I went back?




Chapter 21


“Boy, you sure stirred up a hornet’s nest,” Josh said, dropping a stack of exercise books on the edge of the dining room table.

I pulled the Heinekens I had been nursing away from my lips.  “What are you talking about?”

“When you didn’t show up for school yesterday and today and the rumor got around school that you weren’t coming back, the third form students jeered Ms. Conte from her French class.  She went running over to Clifford’s office in tears.  Evidently, they called her everything but a whore.”

“Can’t say I’m heartbroken to hear that though I wish it had been Cummings-John instead of Conte.”

“The kids are on their way over here now.”

“Who?”

“The third form students.  They began filing down the highway as I drove home.  They’re coming to persuade you to return—they want their Science Master back.  Clifford tried to explain the situation to calm them down; he may have been the one who suggested they bring their concerns to you.”

“You’re kidding!”  But as I said that I began to hear the babbling stream of distant voices from the highway in the direction of the school.  The thought of the third form having hiked the mile from the school flattered my ego.  But the thought of going back to work with colleagues who resented my presence and whom I had parted from on such bad terms—one of whom had now been driven from her classroom in tears—seemed a grim prospect.
“What are you going to do?” 
“Don’t know.  When I talked yesterday in Freetown to the new Rep., McClellan, he certainly wasn’t keen on the idea of trying to transfer me to a new school, especially mid-term.  I asked him about the possibility of returning to the States, but he was adamant: that’s not going to happen, not on the Peace Corps’ dime.  He’s not convinced the situation is serious enough to warrant that.  He wants me to work it out.  I talked to Nolan last night about going back to the States, like some of the other Volunteers.  But I don’t have the money for plane fare right now.”
Outside, I could hear the students’ voices in more hushed tones as they milled about on the paved parking area at the front of the house: snatches of Krio and English, an occasional exchange in a tribal tongue, but their lowered voices made it impossible to discern the contents of what they were saying. 
“Based on what I’ve seen, I think returning to the States would be a mistake.  You’ve only got a little over six months left, and the kids—even Clifford—are behind you.  I wouldn’t worry about Conte or Cummings-John.  Both of them miss enough school they won’t ever have much clout with Clifford or the kids.”
“I just can’t forget what Cummings-John said—that the only reason we’re over here is because we can’t find employment in America.  And for Conte to support her?  It makes you wonder what really goes on inside their heads.”
Just then we heard a knock at the front door.  Josh got up and stuck his head around the arched entrance to the dining room.
“It’s Mohammed,” he said, turning back to me.
I didn’t reply, so Josh went to the door and opened it.
“Is Mr. Livingston here?” I heard Mohammed ask.
“Yes.”
“May I speak with him?”
“Stephen, Mohammed wants to know if he can speak to you?”
Evidently, the group had decided to make Mohammed their spokesperson.  Ordinarily, I would have been flattered for a chance to talk with him: his bearing, intelligence, and work ethic at school were a glimmer of hope for Sierra Leone’s future, but because he was staying with relatives in the opposite direction from school and was expected to work for them after school, I seldom got the chance other than the opportunities afforded in the classroom.  Two visions of my future sparred in my mind: one flattering to the image I harbored of myself—returning to teach the students; the other, an affront—working with colleagues who obviously felt my continued presence at Peninsula was neither needed nor wanted.  At the moment, a smoldering stubbornness resisted the idea of being persuaded to return to the school.
“Tell him to come on in,” I said, resignedly.
“Afternoon, Mr. Livingston.” Mohammed was perspiring from the walk, unusual for him, because he was one of those Africans who seldom broke a sweat.
“Afternoon, Mohammed.”  I hadn’t risen to greet him.  “Won’t you have a seat?”
“Thank you, sir.”
We sat at the table in a tense but respectful silence for a few moments until I finally spoke.  “What can we do for you?”
He hesitated.  “I am here on behalf of the scholars.  They want to know when you will be returning to teach us again.”
Frank and precise, the message didn’t contain the usual obsequies I had grown accustomed to from his counterparts.
“I’m not coming back.”
“We understand, sir.  Alimamy has been telling us of the words spoken by the other masters.  They are jealous of Peace Corps teachers like yourself.”
He looked at me earnestly.  “But the third form exams are coming.  Several of the scholars, like myself, want to be taking the science exam.  We are needing someone to teach us science.  There is no one else to teach us, Mr. Clifford has said.”
His approach to persuasion certainly wasn’t an appeal to my emotions, what Aristotle called pathos.  It wasn’t that I was beloved by the students, or a marvelous teacher.  Mohammed’s message was entirely pragmatic—logos.  They had no one else to turn to.
“I’m sorry, Mohammed, but some of the other teachers at Peninsula have told me that the only reason I have come here is because there are no jobs in America.”
“These teachers spoke from envy, Mr. Livingston.  They know you, Mr. Patterson, and Mr. Johnston are popular with the scholars, that you are better teachers.  They only like to cane us and continue to treat us like grammar school children.  You must not listen to what they are saying.”
“But I have to work with them.”
“It is only for a few months.  When the school year has ended you will be returning to America.  The scholars are many; the bad teachers are few.  We have come all the way to ask you to return to Peninsula to help us in our learning of science.”
How had I deserved this irony?  Having a degree in Creative Writing meant the majority of my college courses were in English: those few A’s and B’s had been the only thing that bailed out my GPA.  But they wanted  help in science, me with my stellar preparation in that discipline: an undeserved C in Chemistry, a D in Organic Chemistry, a D in Physics, an F in my first electrical engineering course which I managed to erase by withdrawing from the course. With only the lone A in Botany to balance these abysmal grades earned in my freshman and sophomore years, my GPA plunged so deeply it never moved beyond a C at graduation, which left me wondering why the Peace Corps had wanted my services in the first place.
To a degree, I resented Mohammed’s calculated pragmatism.  I wanted something more compelling: a dash of that old 18th century flattery due white people, or a pinch of pathos.  The subtext of his message seemed to be I was a better teacher because I did not cane or maliciously disrespect them.  The students’ nearly mile long trek in the hot afternoon sun to plead their case had moved me.  Such a public display never would have occurred to me in my wildest scenarios of how this predicament might play out.  However, Mohammed’s message appeared to be “Yes, Mr. Livingston, you filled a need—not a place in our hearts.”  
But no flattery or emotional appeal was forthcoming.  In retrospect, I have come to realize this young man had made it easier for me to save face.  In my heart as well as my brain, I knew I would return—there was nowhere else to go, and I couldn’t just walk away from these kids.  For better or worse, I had an investment in their futures.  I couldn’t just abandon them, even if all they wanted from me were my pitiful efforts to teach science.  It was clear from the look on Mohammed’s face that he would like to have a positive response from me to report to the students gathered outside, but his matter-of-fact approach gave me room to save face.
“Give me a little more time to think about it,” I finally said.
Mohammed nodded, then quietly tip-toed from the room.  I moved to a chair close to a window so I could hear but not be seen.  When he spoke to the rest of the students, I heard murmured expressions of disappointment and more anger directed at my African colleagues—they had marched all this way with no absolute resolution to their petition.  But he managed to persuade most of them that this was a positive sign and they should all go home and give Mr. Livingston the opportunity to reconsider.
* * * * *
Thankfully, my rift with other members of faculty at the school, particularly the ladies, drew attention away from Alimamy and, when I did relent two days later, nothing more was said about the “tiffing” incident—the resolution of the matter was left up to the Waterloo police. 
Marked by the silent treatment from Koker, Conte, and Cummings-John, the first week back passed awkwardly.  Clifford, however, did his best to act as if nothing had ever happened.
One day, Mr. Kamara, the handsome new teacher, whose pouty good looks and reserved charm reminded me of Sidney Poitier, came to the science lab and asked to talk privately.  Kadiatu and I were going over a paper she had just gotten back from Clifford that sported a large red D.  So I asked her if she could bring it by the house later in the day and we could finish going over it.  Her eyes protested, obviously peeved by the prerogative I accorded Mr. Kamara to interrupt, but she dutifully left the room. 
Kamara and I had gotten along very well.  I enjoyed his company—bright, hard-working, charming even when that dark pout clouded his features.  But that day, the pout and furrowed brow told me something truly bothered him.  I certainly hoped it hadn’t been my behavior during the cross-examination of Alimamy at the “hearing.”  The kids also respected this man and, with his athleticism, he would have been the logical choice to be Peninsula’s football coach, but raising a family and working diligently to improve his lot in life, he simply didn’t have the time. However, I had persuaded him to referee the match against the military school, and he had promised to fill the same role in our upcoming match with Bishop Johnson.
“Mr. Livingston,” he began.
“Please, call me Stephen.”
“Forgive me . . . Stephen.  I came to tell you I am fearful for your safety.”
The seriousness of his demeanor and the bluntness of the message gave me pause.
“Did anyone come to your house during the night?”
Startled, I replied, “No, not that I’m aware of.”
“Ms. Cummings-John has told people of the village about the meeting we had after school regarding your boy, Alimamy.  She has been telling people, especially the unemployed young men, you insulted African women in your remarks.  I’m sure you are aware by now that this woman is a gossip.  Her grievances are petty affronts, but she is very clever at manipulating others to her own advantage.”
Kamara looked at me directly, as if to check whether he had my attention.  “At first I thought people would consider who was saying these things.  However, last night I heard a rumor that a group of young men had decided to go to your house—to punish you.  I was told where they were meeting so, hearing of their intentions, I hurried over quickly to speak with them . . . to persuade them to reconsider this course of action.  They were very agitated, but I cautioned them that attacking an American school master would bring trouble and disgrace to them and, also, to Waterloo.  I told them of the meeting at the school, that words were spoken in anger, but I did not hear you say anything that dishonored African women.  When I finally left the meeting I was hopeful that they no longer planned to attack you.  But with such young men it is impossible to say.”
I could feel my head wobbling on its axis again, the adrenaline surging through my body.  Could this be true?  Or just another ruse to frighten me?  Yet I trusted Kamara above all the other African teachers at Peninsula. 
“So you didn’t hear me say anything that dishonored African women?”
“No, no.  This is what I have been telling them.  My wife and I have been living in Waterloo only a short time, but I asked them if a story my wife told me about Ms. Cummings-John was true.  This woman had a very similar complaint against a man in the village last year, and the man was beaten . . . badly.  I don’t know if these were the same men, but I do believe Ms. Cummings-John likes to stir up trouble.”
“What should I do?”
“You must avoid her.  I would not talk to her anymore; she will only distort whatever you say.  When you are going home, be more vigilant.  Be sure you and Mr. Johnston lock your doors at night.  Tell your watchman what I have told you.  The young men of the village fear him.”
I was stunned hearing that not only was the “hearing” episode not going away, but it had escalated to a violent threat upon my welfare.
“Thank you for telling me this.  I’m in your debt.”
“You are not in my debt.  Still, if you want to repay me, teach the scholars science.  It is good . . . this thing that you are doing.  We Africans must stop quarreling amongst ourselves and biting the hand of those who truly want to help us achieve a better way of life.  I believe education is the key, and those of you who have volunteered for the Peace Corps are here to help us, not steal our natural resources or convert us to your religions as Europeans and other whites have done in the past.  The white man has exploited Africa for centuries, but we must learn to look beyond white faces to the inner motives of those who say they have come to help us.”
I hadn’t heard such sentiments expressed since I had first come to West Africa, and my eyes began to well up in gratitude.  This man who I would have liked to call friend, an educated and compassionate African, had given voice to the belief of our murdered President—we were working side-by-side with the citizens of the world, to improve their lot and free them from the tyranny of disease, impoverishment, hunger, and lack of education.  
But once more, the clouds of guilt descended.  Could I honestly answer I was in Africa to pursue the ideal he held up before me.  I had spent so much of my energy the past year and a half walling out the Africa I had supposedly come to serve.  Taunted  by the threat “white man’s grave,” I had cloaked myself in the netting of isolation: digging out a badminton court, listening to classical music, shopping in only the fine stores in Freetown for frozen meats and other European delicacies, preferring the fraternity of fellow Americans and Europeans to the company of Africans, and all the while longing for the fast lane of convenience we had left behind—the carryout pizzas, the fast-food drive-ins, the endless networks of paved roads, the legion of helpmates and diversions electricity had fostered (light or cool air at the flick of a switch, vacuum cleaners, can openers, television, stereos, and phone service)—that defined life in America.  We had been raised to take for granted checkups at the doctor and dentist, nearby state of the art hospitals, drugs for every conceivable malady—and, of course, that most seemingly inconsequential of all life’s amenities, safe, reliable sources of drinking water.  
My red-headed predisposition to anger had gotten the best of me. and I had reacted viscerally to the petty accusations of Cummings-John and Conte.  Circumstances had provided an object lesson in how to parry the arrogance and envy of others: meeting it with measured humility.  But I had met arrogance with arrogance—a naiveté that Africa owed me something for what I perceived as personal sacrifice.  I had craved only a show of gratitude like Kamara’s or, if not that, at least the courtesy that they suppress their own festering resentment for the Peace Corps presence in Sierra Leone.
I shook Mr. Kamara’s hand, finding his grip firm and warm, thanked him for his advice and for intercepting the band of young men intent on avenging the honor of African women.  He had provided the lesson so easily forgotten in the heat of our prejudicial passions: if we would paint humanity’s soul, our palettes had best be rich with color.  
* * * * *
Against the promptings of better judgment, I began to tutor Kadiatu  twice a week.  We began with sessions in the afternoon, but shortly thereafter she informed me Mrs. Clifford wasn’t happy with this arrangement.  Frida wanted her around the Clifford’s house to help with preparations for dinner and the cleanup afterwards.  So darkness had already begun to fall by the time she showed up for her tutoring.  I couldn’t let her walk up the hill through the dark forest, so I drove her back either in the Jeep or the Renault, whichever was handy.
At that point, I should have ended the tutoring.  I noticed she began wearing African dress clothes that subtly hid the fullness of her breasts better than her ragged, unflattering uniform, and I was certain I detected a faint scent of something like perfume as we sat side-by-side at the dining room table.  She fidgeted while I went over her writing, her legs swinging in perpetual motion like pendulums on a fully wound clock.  Each session she grew more petulant and impatient as I pointed out her errors in grammar and punctuation; it became rather obvious that she wasn’t particularly interested in improving her writing.  And all the while, buzzing in the back of my mind was her candid declaration: “What I mean to do is sexual intercourse. . . .”
I don’t recall exactly how or why it began.  Unlike Christiana, Kadiatu did not scoot over towards me in our four minute ride up the hill, but the pheromones of the subtle scent she wore quickly melted my resolve to keep my hands off my student and the Headmaster’s house girl.  In our third trip through the darkened forest, I plunged over the abyss once again.  Stopping the Jeep, I reached over to draw her towards me, kissing her without hesitation.  Her mouth was robustly receptive—no hot peppers, just the bracing tang of recently brushed teeth.
On the evenings when her tutoring sessions ended, the “stop” became a fixture in our relationship.  I never gave a thought to the fact that the sound of the Jeep coming up the hill easily carried to the Clifford’s residence and that they might think it strange the noise of a vehicle in first gear paused for ten minutes, then started up again.  But neither Malcolm nor Frida questioned this curious pattern.  Perhaps the roar of the five Petronax lanterns they kept burning in the evenings made them oblivious to the normal tyranny of hearing on moonless African nights. 
We never lingered more than ten minutes to “neck” in the darkness.  I would stop the Jeep just below the turn that carried us past Orville’s bungalow.  Instead of the lapa, she began to wear a short skirt, and I would slip my left hand into the crease between her legs, running it up to that mystical fountain of womanhood.  I quickly discovered I could make her juices flow with this overture; it gave me a sense of power, this discovery of the remarkable way her body responded to my prying hands.  
Wooing and becoming intimate with Kadiatu, I would discover, became an obsession, an addiction I could not say no to.  Granted, in this case not much wooing was required; still she instinctively knew to provoke me into being the aggressor.  Her response to all the ploys of our mutual passion quickly eclipsed my perceptions of our racial differences, the distinct imbalance of ages and the teacher-pupil roles, even the fact that she was a ward of our Headmaster.  Those few minutes of passion worked on my mind like a narcotic I could not help craving in the days between each encounter.  I could no longer resist the temptation to get yet another “fix.”
One night, groping in the stuffy confines of the Jeep, intent on wringing the delights of intimacy from these stolen minutes, we both heard the first gear whine of Clifford’s Vauxhall as it turned from the highway and began its climb up the hill.  In a split second our nerves were in free fall, from euphoria to panic.  I struggled to right myself in the driver’s seat.  My first thought was to turn the Jeep’s headlights on so he might think he was simply following us up the hill.  Glancing in the rear view mirror, I saw the light from the Vauxhall’s high beams dancing with eerie urgency in the foliage at the first turn in the drive.  Kadiatu cried out in anguish, “Mr. Clifford!  Mr. Clifford!”
I had already hatched a story in my mind—the Jeep had stalled—when Lady Luck smiled on our desperation, and trusty Silver’s engine kicked over immediately.  We had barely completed the second turn in the drive before the headlights of Clifford’s car became visible in the rearview mirror.  By the time we reached the roundabout parking area at the south end of the D.C.’s residence, he was already on our tail.  Climbing down from the Jeep, I racked my mind for answers to the questions I thought he might raise.  Kadiatu, as was her custom, melted into the darkness while Clifford retrieved some things from the boot of the Vauxhall.
He explained he had been in the village for a meeting with the church elders.  Neither Kadiatu nor I had noticed the Vauxhall coasting down the road past our house earlier in the evening, which is why he caught us by surprise.
“Good news.  I got word today the mission is sending us seventy pounds to replace the money that was stolen.  You can tell Alimamy his name has been cleared.  They think they apprehended the two fellows who stole the money—spent most of it on a drunken orgy in a Waterloo home, sloshed on omole and beer.”
“That is good news,” I said, “. . . about the real culprits being caught, I mean.”
“I should think a few months in Pademba Road Prison will sober them up.  That’s not a place I’d want to visit for any extended stay.”
I was wary about continuing to pass the time conversing with Clifford, for it could quickly become a mine field, and my nerves, already worn raw by guilt and panic, might cause me to blunder.  He asked me how the sessions with Kadiatu’s were coming along.  I gambled with a strategy that on occasion had served me well in the past: tread as perilously close to telling the truth as you possibly can.
“I have to confess I don’t see much improvement,” I replied.  “I think your diagnosis may be right—she’s acting like ‘some moonstruck teenager.’  She can’t seem to focus on school work.  Do you know if she has a love interest, a boyfriend at school or in Waterloo?”
“They all have boyfriends.”  He fixed me with the noxious Cheshire grin: “Trick is to keep them from getting pregnant at age eleven or twelve.”
We bid each other goodnight, and as I drove back down the hill, clammy with relief and welcoming the cool air washing through the open window, I wondered how long I could keep up this charade.  I also began to wonder if Josh suspected something was going on between Kadiatu and me.  If Orville had been my roommate, I think I could have bluffed my way through any of his suspicions.  But Josh was a fairly keen observer, and the way he occasionally eyeballed me in Kadiatu’s presence tipped me off that our behavior might be arousing suspicion.
I decided when the opportunity presented itself to confide in him.  I wanted very badly to lay some of the blame for becoming involved with Kadiatu at his feet, for his ongoing affair with Michelle made me hungry for the kind of intimacy I supposed they had, though as I thought about it, I realized this was an extreme example of comparing apples with oranges.  
I found my opportunity to open up one day when both of the boys, who usually rode to school in the Jeep with us, had taken off early to go into town before school started.  I didn’t want to get into a discussion at the house or school for fear of prying ears.  The boys’ room was at the foot of a short staircase that led from the dining room down to their quarters beneath the house.  They came and went unannounced in our part of the house, padding noiselessly like dark specters across the tile floors in their bare feet: returning or picking up laundry, sweeping, dusting, checking the kerosene levels in the stove, fridge, and lanterns.  
This morning’s short ride to school had the advantage of giving Josh and me not only the needed privacy, but also cut short discussion of the matter.  I knew how much I wanted to tell him; I wasn’t ready to answer questions about the nature of my relationship with Kadiatu nor suffer a lecture on the stupidity of my actions.  To my relief, Josh did neither.
* * * * *
The shadows had grown long as afternoon turned to evening that day.  I sat at the dinner table engrossed, as usual, in making some headway marking the piles of ungraded student compositions.  I had called down to Alimamy and Santigie a few minutes before to come fill and light the lanterns, but there had been no answer. so I assumed they were off on some other errand or rendezvous with girls in the village.   It was past dinner time, but a sodden inertia had seized me as I slogged through the mind-numbing task of reading handwritten compositions in order to identify the forest of grammar and punctuation errors.  Josh had driven to Freetown to take Michelle out to dinner—he was growing more anxious about popping the question.  I hoped no wedding bells would ring before my departure for the States.  My imagined scenario of the three of us sharing the house had absolutely no appeal.  
Glazunov’s fifth symphony, recorded from Nolan’s collection on a Phillips battery-operated tape player, blared in the background.  Suddenly, a pair of hands closed over my eyes, pulling me back in the chair.  I had always been intrigued by our cultural myth that in the minute or two before death, your whole life flashes before your mind.  This moment in my life seemed to validate that notion, for in a matter of nanoseconds my mind suddenly displayed an array of Kodak moments—mostly conjecture, but some fact.  There was Mr. Kamara’s advice to be more vigilant at home; my failure to lock the front door; a snapshot of my bloodied face, beaten to pulp by Ms. Cummings-John’s avengers; the night watchman bound and gagged in the garage; my vulnerability sitting there at the dining table with no one to come to my rescue; the fact that the hands over my eyes were smaller and weaker than those of a young man, and I sensed no other presence in the room.
There was a giggle.  I grabbed at an arm, pulling its hand off one eye and jerking the writhing offender into my line of vision alongside the chair.
“Fudia!” I exclaimed in exasperation.  “What are you doing in here?  My God you scared me!”
Helplessly doubled over in laughter, she tugged at my grip.  I let go suddenly and she fell backwards, righting herself like a cat before hitting the floor.
“Mama send me.”
“What for?”
She ignored the question sidling up to the table to look through a stack of exercise books.  She picked one from the stack—it had Kadiatu’s jagged printing on the cover—and began leafing through it.  The cold fingers of another paranoia attack ran up my spine.  Her selection of Kadiatu’s book seemed too calculated to pass as coincidence.
“Leave the exercise books alone.”
She dropped the book back on the stack.  “You have American titi, Mr. Livingston?”
Titi?  That was Krio for girlfriend.  “Yes . . . yes I do.  Though that’s really none of your business.”
“You no get African titi?”
“Look, Fudia.  I have grading to do.  What did you come here for?”
“Mama is sending for milk.”
“Why does she need milk?”
“Her breasts gone dry . . . no milk for baby.  No money for buy milk.”  She fell back into an easy chair in the living room, sprawling in it full length, her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.
“We don’t have any milk, only milk powder.”
“We take powder.  You give to me?”
I sighed.  Had her mother’s breasts really gone dry?  Could an infant survive on powdered milk in place of breast milk?  More uncharted territory.  Personally, I couldn’t stand the stuff and used it only on my breakfast cereal or occasionally in cooking though the results were largely unsatisfactory.  Josh’s breakfast consisted of cigarettes and two or three cups of black coffee.  I gave in and went to the kitchen to retrieve the half-empty tin of powdered milk. 
Alimamy and Santigie came up the stairs from their room, their arms burdened with laundry.  Fudia sprang from her chair and began following them to the bedrooms, all the while talking animatedly in Krio.  I could only catch a word now and then: “titi” was one of them. Alimamy’s face was locked in a scowl as the boys descended the staircase back to their quarters, Fudia followed them, leaving the tin of Klim on the table.
Just as I suspected: the plea for milk had been a subterfuge to justify her coming into the house.  “Fudia, did you forget something?” I hollered down the stairs.  “Fudia!”
No answer.  I called again, but still no answer.  
Alimamy’s head appeared in the doorway to their quarters.  “Fudia has gone, Mr. Livingston.”
“Where did she go?”
“I am thinking maybe she is in the back with her family.”
I picked up the tin of powdered milk and returned it to the kitchen.  Inscrutable!  Deception layered upon deception, like the reverent salutations of hitchhikers on the highway whose families and stores were hidden from sight in the phantasmagorical African bush.
Did the watchman’s family really need milk for the baby?  Who knew?  To the glazed eyes of foreigners like myself, Africa’s personal motives were scripted against the numbing statistical backdrop of poverty, disease, malnutrition, starvation, and infant mortality.  Up close each narrative became as arcane as the theoretical existence of black holes in space.  Frustrated, you finally reacted from guilt or pity, the hostility of your prejudices, or a moment’s unchecked rage, but seldom from reason.  To me it seemed that the grafting of colonialism upon the timeless social orders of tribalism had produced a hydra-headed monster.
Or was I only overreacting to the pubescent caprice of a child?  And why had I made such a big deal of giving away a half empty tin of powdered milk?  The walls of reason toppled like dominoes, it appeared, when barbarians lay siege to the sanctity of one’s personal space.




Chapter 22


Fudia made herself scarce for a couple of days.  I thought perhaps her old man had gotten wind of her trespass into our house.  However, I began to worry about the baby.  Perhaps it was true: her mother needed milk, even powdered milk.  I stared at the can of Klim sitting on the kitchen shelf above the water filter.  Looking through the glass on the back door, I saw her mother, sitting trance-like and despondent, rocking the nursing baby to and fro on the tiny porch in the front of their dwelling.  Fudia was nowhere in sight.

What the hell!  We’re not using it.  I grabbed the can, unlocked the back door and descended the steps.  When I offered the can to her, she looked up momentarily, her eyelids drooping from some invisible, oppressive weight.  Her black flesh had a chalky cast as if she hadn’t enough moisture left in her body to perspire.  

“Milk,” I said.  “For the baby.”  She nodded, a languid smile forming on her lips caked in the corners with that white chalky residue .  “For the baby,” I repeated, setting the can on the floor of the porch, convinced now that Fudia had not been lying about her mother’s need, but still confused by the girl’s behavior.  Where was her sense of urgency?  She had acted like a petulant teen full of hormones and contradictions, for God’s sake.  Then gone off abandoning the can of milk!


* * * * *

The day of our reckoning with Bishop Johnson’s football team had arrived.  I was thankful that the game, whatever its outcome, would soon be over, for my role as coach had become frustrating and exhausting.  The last couple of weeks, practices had been an exercise in futility.  Headaches, bellyaches, wounds, sprains, buses and lorries to catch, chores awaiting them after school.  It became impossible to field enough players to practice simultaneously both defense and offense.  A couple of minutes into each practice, arguing and wrangling would begin, or someone would kick the ball into the dense undergrowth surrounding the field and everyone stood around waiting for the culprit to retrieve the ball.  They were incorrigible individualists, despite my constant insistence on cooperation and playmaking.  Once a kid got the ball, passing it to someone else seemed to be the farthest thing from his mind.  Once he lost control of the ball, insults were traded and play came to a screeching stop.  I felt like calling Mr. During at Bishop Johnson from our local post office to tell him the match was off: Peninsula simply wasn’t ready to partake in his plan of building Sierra Leone’s national identity.  And now, on the day of the game, Sheku Bangura, our best player, hadn’t shown up for school. 
Clifford had spent most of the day shuttered in his office.  The few times he came out he seemed aloof, elusive.  I had a free hour in the early afternoon, so I drove to Waterloo to purchase the obligatory “goodies” for the players’ refreshment.  As I loaded the Jeep, Sheku suddenly materialized beside me.  He wanted to know if he could play even though he hadn’t attended school that day.  He had broken one of Clifford’s cardinal rules: if you didn’t show up for school, you couldn’t represent the school in a football match.  I had supported the rule initially, but more and more I was beginning to learn why athletic coaches are infamous for bending the rules of academic eligibility.  There were simply too many contingencies to account for in order to field the best players.       
Sheku’s relatives lived in Kissy at the east end of Freetown.  His family had become devout Seventh Day Adventists and since Peninsula was the only Adventist secondary school in Sierra Leone, he made the trip by lorry each day.  He explained that the boys in Kissy taunted him because he played for Peninsula’s team.  This match was a chance to avenge their insults.  He had missed school that day because the lorry he was riding in had broken down.  The argument seemed compelling, so I told him I didn’t have a problem with his playing that afternoon but he had best keep a low profile.  Out of all the teachers, I figured only Kamara would be at the game and Sheku wasn’t in any of Kamara’s classes, and Headmaster Clifford would have little knowledge of who was actually in school that day.  
Would I give him a lift back to the school compound?  I questioned why he hadn’t simply turned up at school late instead of skipping the whole day.  I wasn’t about to abet or excuse this particular truancy and incur Clifford’s wrath.  Sheku said he feared Master Koker would not believe the story about the lorry breakdown, accuse him of telling lies and have him clean the latrines after school.  Grudgingly, I agreed to drive him to the junction near the school where he could slip back onto the compound, my mind battling all the while to suppress the self-serving nature of the rationale behind this decision.
When I returned to the Peninsula compound, the entrance to the parking lot was blocked.  A lorry had parked right in the middle of the lot, blocking access to any parking spaces.  Headmaster Clifford, clad in shorts and a V-neck undershirt, was walking briskly from his office toward the lot with a peeved, resolute look on this face.  Mr. During stood at the rear of the lorry issuing commands as the players jumped down.  Surprise, surprise!  The Bishop Johnson team had set a new record for punctuality.  Another lorry blocked the entrance to the lot, the driver beeping his horn impatiently; it contained the building materials Clifford had ordered to be delivered the Friday his office had been broken into and the seventy pounds stolen.  Three weeks late—no surprise!
Clifford marched up to the lorry unloading the players, ordering the driver to move his vehicle so the other lorry could get on the lot.  Before moving, however, the driver got out to consult with Mr. During.  During gave his assent, and seeing Clifford walked around the front of the vehicle offering his outstretched hand to Peninsula’s headmaster.
Clifford ignored the gesture, turned on his heels and motioned to the waiting lorry at the lot’s entrance to pull in.  Knowing Clifford’s history with During, his total lack of respect for the man since the interview for a position at Peninsula, I wasn’t surprised by this snub.  Still, its blatant rudeness was a troubling omen for the football match about to be played.  Shrugging his shoulders, During lowered his hand in mock disbelief.
Several Peninsula students, who had been commandeered to help unload the building materials, straggled over to the parking lot.  In his impatience, Clifford had already begun unloading the lorry by himself while the driver looked on, calmly smoking a cigarette.  During stood shaking his head at this display of conduct unbecoming a headmaster.
Meanwhile, I had begun carrying the refreshments from the Jeep to the science lab.  That task finished, I gathered the players together in the lab and passed out the promised shoes, gold and green socks, and jerseys.  I reminded them of all the things we had practiced over the intervening weeks: pass the ball, no grandstand dribbling, hold their offensive and defensive positions.  After doing a little more reading about football strategy, I had abandoned my notion of the “W” alignment (my own invention which required a talented “sweeper” which we didn’t have and, consequently, left the backfield too vulnerable) and settled on the popular 4-4-2 alignment: 4 backs, 4 midfielders, and two forwards which, I reasoned, would give us a stronger defense.  My final plea—whatever you do, do not question Mr. Kamara’s calls.  
A large crowd from Waterloo had gathered along the sidelines, and my heart sank at the vision of yet another humiliation which, in all likelihood, lay ahead.  For the first ten minutes or so, though Bishop Johnson controlled the ball movement, our players seemed to be holding their own, frustrating attempts to penetrate our defensive positions.  Then Peninsula suddenly had the ball in front of Bishop’s goal.  Their goalie, a tall young tough in dark glasses, sporting dark lavender shorts, a black vest, and a lavender beret set at a rakish angle on one side of his head, came forward from the goal and dove at the ball just as Sheku drove it forcefully in the direction of the goal.  The ball glanced off the goalie’s fingers and into the goal just under the crossbar.  The Waterloo faithful went wild, and my own heart started a little dance.  Bishop’s goalie, however, was writhing on the field holding first his hand and then grabbing his head.
During crossed the sideline immediately to tend to his fallen goalie.  Mr. Kamara trotted over to the two as Bishop’s players gathered around.  I was standing right at the sideline where it happened and could hear During complaining to Kamara that not only was Sheku offside, but he had kicked his goalie in the head.
From my vantage point, both accusations were a complete crock.  Sheku hadn’t been offside and the fellow may have had reason to complain about the ball jamming his fingers, but the head business was pure football theater.  After what seemed like an interminable delay, the young man got up with During’s help.  I asked Sheku to apologize just as a matter of form, which he did, with minimal reluctance.
“Go tehl yu sista i McGregor,” the goalie spat.  Sheku, piqued by this response to his apology, charged at the goalie and it was all I could do to restrain him.  No taunt had more rank in the hierarchy of Krio insults.  McGregor had been a popular brand of athletic footwear, and the foot being the lowliest part of the human anatomy in an African’s thinking, this epithet essentially meant, “Tell your sister (whether or not the hearer had one) her value is equal to my much abused shoes.”  Naturally, Sheku took umbrage and it was all I could do to restrain him.  Mr. During, meanwhile, was giving me an impromptu lecture on sportsmanship followed by a complaint that, because the field hadn’t been properly leveled, his team suffered the disadvantage of having to move the ball uphill.  I apologized, tongue-in cheek, for the condition of the field but recalled for his benefit the initial coin toss, which Peninsula had won, and consoling him at last with the reminder that Peninsula would be playing uphill in the second half.
As Bishop’s goalie returned to his position, still holding his head, one of During’s assistants came up to inform me that they were going to continue the game under protest.  I had no idea what that meant, but shrugged with indifference and the fellow ran off to deliver the message of my body language to coach During.
The commotion had caught Clifford’s attention and he left his task of unloading materials, walking over to me along the sidelines.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
“Coach During is complaining that his goalie was kicked in the head by the player who just scored our first goal.  He has let me know their team is finishing the game ‘under protest’.”
“Did one of our players actually kick the boy in the head?”
“Not from my vantage point.  The goalie may have jammed his fingers trying to stop the ball, but the head injury was all acting.”
“Didn’t you tell me Bishop Johnson’s coach is that fellow During?”
“Yeah, I remember you told me he interviewed for a position here.”
Clifford rubbed his chin vigorously.  “I was afraid there might be a problem playing this team again.  Bishop Johnson’s students come mostly from the east end of Freetown—a tough lot.”  He stared at the goalie momentarily.  “Judging from the look of that fellow, he’s apt to cause trouble.”
Play had resumed while we talked and a roar went up from the crowd as Peninsula’s two forwards closed on Bishop’s goal.  Sheku had the ball again and lofted it to Alimamy who headed it into the goal beyond the outstretched hands of the goalie.  My heart jumped: we had actually scored another goal!  And by heading the ball!  The score was now Peninsula two, Bishop Johnson zip!
The players in Bishop’s backfield were yelling at one another and at the goalie who sullenly retrieved his beret and dark glasses from the dirt.  Peninsula’s players were still dancing about Sheku and Alimamy, congratulating them.  Kamara whistled for the ball to be centered and play resumed.  The balance of the first half became a defensive stand-off and the score remained two to zero.
Play at the beginning of the second half moved along smoothly but the defensive struggle continued.  About midway through the half, Peninsula intercepted an errant pass and began moving the ball toward Bishop’s goal.  One of our two forwards had taken up a position in line with Bishop’s goal with only one defender between him and the goalie.  The left midfielder lofted a high pass in his direction.  Bishop’s goalie charged but instead of trying to catch the ball in his hands, kicked high even before the ball had arrived, just missing our forward’s face.  Kamara whistled a foul, but as the ball was downed for a free kick, Bishop’s goalie kicked the ball away.  Kamara walked over and gave him a severe tongue lashing.  A loud insult aimed at the goalie came from one of our players at midfield.  Sheku was standing in the direction the insult had come from, head down, digging nonchalantly at the ground with the toe of his shoe.  Incensed, the goalie pushed Kamara aside and charged in Sheku’s direction.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Clifford said, and before I could react he was jogging across the field to intercept the goalie.  They met near midfield where Clifford’s hands went up and clamped the goalie’s shoulders on either side of his neck.  The young man, for his part, began flailing at Clifford with his hands and arms trying to break the hold.  Unfortunately, even from where I stood, it looked like our headmaster was choking the goalie.
The majority of Peninsula’s student body were from upcountry, the disenfranchised “Protectorate” under British rule where the person of a headmaster was still held in high esteem.  No one, particularly a student, assaulted an official of this rank, particularly a white headmaster who also served as shepherd of the Waterloo Adventist flock.  Several of Peninsula’s players, aroused by this attack, flocked to Clifford’s rescue.  But now Bishop’s players rallied behind their goalie which, in turn, caused the collapse of the invisible walls that had kept Waterloo spectators behind the sidelines.  The field quickly became one huge melee.  At the center of this raging whirlpool, Clifford still clung to the young goalie, but his hands now nearly encircled the young man’s neck.  The goalie, for his part, struggled to free himself not only from Clifford’s grip but from other hands and arms reaching out to subdue him. 
During ran over to me gesturing dramatically at the spectacle.  “I have never witnessed such behavior—and by a headmaster.  The man is choking my goalie!”
“I believe he’s merely trying to restrain him,” I said.
Frantic that the altercation could turn ugly, I left During standing there and ran to break up the little eddies of combat that had sprung up on various parts of the field.  Some of the spectators began arming themselves with rocks, bottles, sticks—any weapon at hand, their faces distorted by the kind of savageness I had witnessed in the goons who had attacked Harlan James when he attempted to photograph the Poro Devil.  I pleaded, cajoled, and even threatened— anything to stave off an impending riot.  With the help of the Peninsula players and students who had not joined the fray, we persuaded some members of the crowd to throw down their weapons and get off the field so the game could continue.  We were winning the match for God’s sake!  Let us finish the game.
For ten or so minutes the hubbub continued unabated.  It was like trying to stop a brush fire in the drought-stricken Australian Outback.  During shoved his way to the center of the swirling tangle of bodies around Clifford and the goalie.  He launched a withering tirade about Clifford’s attempt to choke the young goalie and about the unsportsmanlike treatment he and his players had received since coming to Waterloo.  He gloated, remarking that no such incident had occurred in Freetown when Peninsula had played on Bishop Johnson’s field.  
Clifford released his grip on the goalie, explaining his intent was only to restrain the young man and prevent a fight.  During, however, became livid, now incensed by intelligence from one of his assistants that the referee chosen for the match belonged to Peninsula’s staff.  Definitely not cricket—clearly the last straw in During’s mind.
Clifford’s lips began to curl in disgust as he sensed the futility of continuing to suffer this harangue.  Paler than I had ever seen him, he shambled toward his office, head down, the Waterloo faithful parting like the Red Sea as he passed.  During barked like a small dog after the departing figure, but eyeing the menacing crowd, threw up his hands in frustration.  Having vanquished Clifford, he spied me trying to gather together the members of both teams and shepherd them to the science lab, for my main concern had become the mob of spectators, not the tempers of the players.  I heard my name called, but ignored the summons.
“You, white man, I am talking to you.”
I was still trying to shoo the players into the room when I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I wheeled to face the intruder.  “I’ve heard your story already, Mr. During, and I’m fed up to here with it,” and I passed my hand across my forehead to indicate the depth of my disdain.  
I aimed my index finger at his nose, my voice quivering: “If you don’t want big trouble for you and your boys, you had best help me get them to come into the lab until this crowd cools off.”
I wasn’t so much fearful of the competitive antagonism of the two teams, as I was the menacing “let’s stone the bastards” look in the faces of the Waterloo faithful.  Too many hands were hefting rocks.
“Are you threatening us?”
I turned my back on the question and stepped toward the door to the lab.
“Just a minute, I want to—“
I felt a wave of nausea as his hand touched my shoulder again.  I whirled, grabbing him by the shirt and slamming his body into the lab door.  He felt skeletal in my hands, his feet nearly on tiptoe.  Shaking with rage and fighting for words that would get this smarmy incubus out of my face, I screamed, “Listen, During, I’ve had it with you.  Those people out there are aching to stone your boys.  You get your team together and get the hell off this compound, do you hear?”
Undeterred, he started to protest again.  
“You say another word and I’ll split your fucking skull myself!”
His body felt clammy and fragile beneath my fingers, a loathsome bag of only hot air.  I could hear the rasping catarrh of his breathing, and suddenly I felt ashamed.  As I released my grip, he gave me a look I’ll never forget—as though he were staring into Conrad’s heart of darkness.  Then he slithered away, motioning to his team and assistants to board the lorry.
  Once more I asked our team members for help—talk to the spectators, impress upon them we wanted no violence.  A couple of the players protested, but grudgingly agreed when I gave them a little speech about how, even though the game would not be finished, we had avenged our loss in Freetown, and we didn’t want that marred by violence.  Regrettably, a few grammar school boys from the crowd chased after the departing lorry, hurling small stones in its direction, but most of them missed their mark.
Clifford kept a low profile the rest of the week, no longer sporting his sardonic grin as he scurried across the compound.  The unsatisfactory ending to what might have been Peninsula’s first victory seemed to ring hollower than all of its previous humiliating defeats.  I felt like the character of Joe Btfsplk in the Li’l Abner comic strip, a dark cloud dogging all my endeavors.  Fortunately, Friday of that week signaled the beginning of the Christmas break.
* * * * *
The dry season had begun to stalk all living things with its implacable monotony.  The haze of the Harmattan dulled the cerulean atmosphere once more and the water supply coming from the taps of our dwelling became even more unreliable than those in the bungalow.  A ray of hope lay ahead: the Public Works Department of Sierra Leone had seen fit to use some AID funds to build a number of small concrete dams in the stream that flowed from the mountains behind the D.C.’s mansion so that Waterloo might have a more reliable source of water during the dry season.  But for the time being, Josh and I found ourselves in competition with an invisible tifman whose crime was stealing our water supply.
Almost a quarter of a mile away, in the field across the drive from our dwelling, a valve had been installed which shut off the water to our house so that the railroad station and Waterloo’s communal taps could receive all of the available water.  The structure we were living in had been empty for a few years and, thus, the expediency of shutting off the water to the house had posed no problem.  
But when the water that normally ran from our taps suddenly trickled to a stop one day, panic set in and, muttering the most colorful imprecations I could summon, I stomped through the dry undergrowth to the valve and found it closed.  I reopened it but, the following morning, our taps had again gone dry.  So I made my way once more across the field to discover what would become the mystery of the valve that appeared to turn itself off.  We kept watch during the day, but saw no one come near the valve.
Josh became increasingly testy, for he had that American obsession with showering every day, and especially the day before his weekend visits to see Michelle.  So he took the initiative to befriend the engineer supervising construction of the dams on the stream and, having sealed this new bond with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, persuaded this gentleman to talk with the master of the train station in the hope that this might be the source of our problem.  To our delight, the valve controlling our water remained open for a couple of weeks, but then the vexing cycle of having to reopen it each day returned.  In our short-sighted and self-indulgent pursuits we had given no thought to the pressing thirst of the Waterloo community.  We didn’t know it then, but this began a tug-of-war for water rights that would rival those battles of the old American West and would last until the dry season had the last word and water ceased to flow to anyone.  




Chapter 23


“What happened to the powdered milk?”

“We have to get more.  I gave what was left to the watchman’s wife.”

“What for?”

“Fudia said her mother’s breasts have gone dry.  There’s no milk for the baby.  What do you want milk for anyway?”

“Michelle uses it in her coffee, which is what I wanted to talk to you about.  Is it okay if she comes here during the Christmas week?”
“Where’s she going to sleep?”
“She can have my bedroom, and I’ll sleep on the floor in the living room.”
“Tell you what.  I haven’t seen Nolan for awhile.  Why don’t I go to Freetown while she’s here?  You two can have a little privacy, and Michelle can sleep in my room.”
I hadn’t told Josh, but I had arranged to meet Kadiatu in Freetown during the break.  The day of the football debacle with Bishop Johnson, after most everyone had left, I locked the science lab and walked to the Jeep, only to discover her sitting in the passenger seat.  Annoyed by this presumption, especially the cheeky light in her eyes, I said nothing as I started the Jeep and started down the highway toward home.
As we neared the house she turned toward me.  “Please, Mr. Livingston, you will carry me to Freetown?”
“Right now?”
“This weekend.”
“I don’t think so.”
She jerked her head to look out the passenger window, as if stung by even the tempered refusal of my response.  Whatever she said next got carried away in the rush of passing air at her window.
“What?”
“Eh!” she exclaimed.  “A se . . . I say, I go leave Mr. Clifford’s house.”
“You mean you’re not going to stay with the Cliffords any longer?”
She nodded.  “They say they are going to leave.  Mrs. Clifford is all the time treating me like a pikin.  I will go to live with my mother in Freetown.” 
So no more tutoring and making out on the front seat of the Jeep in the darkness.  I have compared Kadiatu to a narcotic, but I began to realize she was something more than that, something I had craved since coming to Sierra Leone, something I had desperately sought, perhaps, since first becoming aware of the attractions held by the opposite sex—that craving to be needed and desired.  Finding someone with whom those needs and desires could be mutually explored in the rapturous language of the flesh, without regard for the tedious rituals of etiquette prescribed by the culture I had been born into.  Oh, I knew well the reputation of the sixties when the Victorian strictures against premarital sex were rolled back: my roommate in my sophomore and junior years of college, an insatiable lothario, frequently asked me to vanish from the room we shared so he could bed some winsome coed in a privacy seldom experienced in dorm and rooming house life.  But it was all an arcane mystery to me, selecting the one who gave off those enigmatic signals of mutual attraction, and then the dynamic of the act itself—like the legerdemain of picking a lock, or opening a safe you had no combination to.  There had been no birds and bees counseling from my parents.  Raised in that era when storks were touted as the Fed Ex delivery system of new life, most of what I knew about sex was learned from the pathetically small church library at the First Baptist Church of St. Johns, set down by experts in obfuscation.  Even when I had discovered what I thought must be the signals of mutual attraction, every aching inning of rounding the bases left me stranded at third. 
You know what your problem is?  You need to get laid.”  How often had I heard that cultural cliché as an indictment of my temper or my fits of depression?  Malcolm Clifford hadn’t been the only one who had “lost it” the day of the game with Bishop Johnson. 


Games Master During had pushed my buttons.  Dismissing these little episodes as manifestations of a white man’s alienation in dysfunctional West Africa became an easy rationalization for the sudden outbursts of Clifford and myself.  But something other than the barriers of custom, language, racial differences, and even the weather made us both angry with ourselves, and that anger was eventually directed at others.  Yet Malcolm had a loving wife to attend to his needs and desires; at least on the surface they seemed a loving couple.  And I had reacted savagely to During’s odious mannerisms after discovering in Kadiatu the sensual delights an African woman could offer.  What, then, stoked this anger within, making us lash out at the “other”?  Was the average African’s plight the source of our discomfort?  The fact that neither Clifford nor I could reconcile our markedly distinct missions in Africa with what our senses told us was going on around us?  We lived in relative affluence with creature comforts we took for granted, when all around us so many Africans lived in hopeless poverty and suffering which both of us foolishly tried to ignore.
Part of my growing awareness when Kadiatu and I were together told me our relationship, like the Peninsula’s football field, wasn’t level.  In the ubiquitous hierarchy that ranks a person’s value, I would be regarded her superior in every sense: in education, in age, in economic status, in our distinctly unequal stations in life—a white American school teacher versus an impoverished black student.  In fact I knew, despite being more and more drawn to our relationship, I regarded myself in that light: why else would I have been perturbed by her presence in the Jeep after the football game?  Did I perceive her as I had Juliette, a woman to be cast aside when passion had fled—the concubine or whore who serviced a male’s needs?
“We can make the love in Freetown,” she suddenly murmured.  
The stunning frankness with which she perceived sexual congress always took me by surprise.  Yes, the possibilities in Freetown were more fertile than in Waterloo.  Yes, but where and how, I wondered.  Nevertheless, tantalized by this vague vision of a dream realized, I relented, putting aside the toxic questions and calamitous scenarios poisoning my peace of mind.  I even went so far as to remove the rear seat in the Jeep again, and toss a mattress that had been stored in the garage in the back.  
Another of the many images still inscribed in memory—that day we left for Freetown—she walking down the hill from the D.C.’s mansion, turning from the road into our drive, the barefoot black girl, her hair done up in a bandana like some younger, slimmer Aunt Jemima, a small battered brown suitcase in her right hand and a box bound with twine—the sum of her worldly possessions—balanced on her head.  
When we reached Freetown, she refused to let me take her to her mother’s house, so I dropped her off in front of the Law Courts Building across from the Cotton Tree.  A national landmark in Sierra Leone, legend had it the Cotton Tree was the spot where almost 200 years earlier nearly 400 slaves returned by Great Britain from the U.S. and Nova Scotia had celebrated a new beginning in what they christened the “Province of Freedom.”  The tree’s enduring presence in the center of Freetown had become an omen of promise in Sierra Leone’s quest for independence from Great Britain.  
We agreed to meet at this same spot on Monday evening, December 23rd , a date set with no clear plans for how the evening would be spent.  Not a movie, of course, but someplace relatively remote where, uninterrupted, we could consummate this unlikely attraction that had somehow taken root in our lives.  I gave her two pound notes, then waited in gentlemanly fashion until she had hailed a cab.
* * * * *
So it was the anticipation of this rendezvous that buzzed in my mind the day Josh informed me he wanted to invite Michelle to Waterloo for Christmas, and I willingly offered my bedroom as an alternative to his spending nights on the floor, even as I secretly wondered if this story was given out to preserve Michelle’s reputation.
When the evening of our tryst arrived, Kadiatu already awaited my arrival at the appointed place across from the Cotton Tree.  At first I couldn’t spot her in the dusky light of evening among the press of black faces.  I started a U-turn with the Jeep to scout the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk once more when I heard her calling my name as she ran across the street, caught in my headlights as I completed the turn.
I had decided to take her to Lumley Beach where Katia, the young Israeli girl, and I had found a likely spot for romance (if at first you don’t succeed, try. . . .).  Where else could a black girl and a young white man find enough privacy to quench their unslaked passions, free from the meddling judgments of others?  I had thought of driving back in the direction of Waterloo toward Hastings, but rejected this choice, remembering that night with Christiana and the setting’s singular lack of any romantic ambiance.  The opportunity before us, the offhand chance that we might “go all the way,” called for foresight, proper staging.
A familiar yet not uncomfortable silence fell over both of us as Silver ferried us to the beach.  Turning off the highway, I nosed the Jeep between two clumpy islands of tall grass that marked the furthest encroachment of high tide.  The silence remained unbroken.  Perhaps, I reasoned, the pounding rhythm of the sea, its silvery aura in the moonlight, had no special charms for Kadiatu.  This setting I considered so romantic might seem only a source of protein to her and left her to wondering how many fish inhabited the sea, how many people it sustained and for how long.  Why, she might be wondering, had I chosen this particular spot to make love?  
To rid myself of the impediment of the steering wheel, I crawled over her so that I sat “shotgun” on the passenger side of the front seat.  More as a reflex than any foreboding, I reached over her and locked the driver’s side door.
As we began our customary embrace, kissing, nuzzling—I, tracing through her blouse the globed fullness of her breasts—I found I couldn’t muster the usual enthusiasm for what now, curiously, had become a dispassionate task. Sir John lay sullenly dormant between my legs and Kadiatu also lacked the ardor I had come to expect.  I began trying to ignite her passion the way boy scouts use friction to start fires—rubbing my hand vigorously up and down her thighs.  No spark came, however.  
We both fell back in the Jeep’s front seat, no longer locked in each other’s arms, but now castaways on the disparate islands of selfhood.
“You do not love me,” she said, fretfully rolling and unrolling the hem of her dress.
I could not see her face in the darkness.  Were her feelings truly wounded by the unforeseen staleness in these moments we finally had to ourselves, or was this just another line purloined from the kind of soap opera scripts that had obviously influenced her first love letter?
“I want to go.”  The shrillness of impatience was unmistakable in her voice.  
“Why?”
Why?” she echoed with a sarcasm I had never given her credit for.  “I give you all the love; you give me none.  You want only to love Christiana.”
My God, she knew about the night with Christiana.  I closed my eyes, watching tiny fireflies dance upon my eyelids as though I had been slapped across the forehead.
“Why do you say that?”
“She is telling everyone at school that you have the real love for her—that you are begging to sleep with her.”
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.  She knew—everyone knew, all of God’s children knew.  My head went wobbly on my neck again, like the lost centripetal forces in a spinning top ready to topple erratically to earth.  I closed my eyes hoping to quiet the side to side ricochet of a pinball let loose inside my head.
When I opened them again, I tried to focus on the view out the driver’s side window, fixing my gaze on the Colony mountains where a few lights from the homes of foreign ambassadors and government ministers seemed to blink like the stars in my head.  Katia’s house was up there somewhere.
“How do you know Christiana is telling the truth?”
She didn’t answer.  The waves of the ocean still beat in a steady rhythm on the beach, an unrelenting pendulum counting off the desperate increments of my life.  How many hours?  How many hours had I wasted, snared in situations like this with women, driving or walking home afterwards, my groin aching as if I had been kicked in the balls—hungover with regret and embarrassment—booby-trapped by best laid plans?  Juliette’s words rang in my ears: “White man fuck with his mouth.”
Did I just see the phantom likeness of a face at the side window?  I blinked, but saw nothing.  Instinctively, however, I rolled up the window on the passenger side, locked the door, then leaning over Kadiatu slid the open window alongside the back seat on the driver’s side shut, snapping the lock.  
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I had just started to turn back around when a face appeared at the back window, and then another at the side window.   I heard the handle on the tailgate door rattle; thankfully, it was locked.  Then someone spoke.  Kadiatu screamed.  I was wondering what forces of personal destiny had prompted me to close the windows and lock the passenger door, when I remembered I hadn’t locked the door on the driver’s side.  Just as I reached over Kadiatu to lock it, a face appeared on the other side of the window.  The fellow pressed his face to the glass, distorting his features and laughing in eerie, maniacal tones.  I clicked the lock just a second before he tried the door handle.  
Two more dark forms leaped on the front bumper and began rocking the Jeep from side to side like a teeter-totter.  The fellow at the door on the driver’s side began pounding on the glass so hard I thought it would break.
“Mr. Livingston, le wi go!” Kadiatu cried.  “Dehm boys de bi bad-O!”
I was in full agreement, but as I tried to trade places with her to get back in the driver’s seat, a belt loop on my shorts caught on a knob on the dash.  The Jeep was still rocking, but suddenly the guy at the driver’s window barked an order for the others to join him on that side.  I thought I counted at least six of the dark forms take their places alongside the Jeep.  They began rocking the vehicle, chanting in unison.  The driver’s side of the vehicle felt momentarily suspended as I managed to disengage my pants from the knob, fumbling for the ignition key with slick perspiring fingers.  If they managed to flip the vehicle on its side, we’d be helpless, like a beetle or turtle on its back.  
Trusty Silver’s engine turned over immediately when I turned the key.  Gunning the engine, I laid on the horn at the same time.  Outside, cries of alarm accompanied the Jeep’s descent to earth with a jarring thud.  I backed slowly to avoid crushing stray arms or legs in the Jeep’s path but quickly regretted this humane retreat as three of them jumped on the front bumper.
“Driver, let wi go!” Kadiatu cried, her voice less shrill.
I floored the accelerator this time; bodies went flying as we bounced backwards into the brush on the other side of the highway.  By the time I had stopped the Jeep, however, and found first gear, all six had regrouped, blocking our path onto the highway.  I pulled out the headlight switch, hit the horn again, gunned the engine once, twice; still, they held their ground.
Alright you bastards, PWD can scrape your remains off the tarmac in the morning!  Silver hurtled through bodies diving to the right and left.  I dreaded the sickening thump of a limb or body caught under the crushing weight of the Jeep.  The headlights had trapped one of them like a deer on a country lane, and he made the foolish decision to outrun the Jeep, heading for a small dune close to the road.  But he was no match for the Jeep’s speed, and I bore down on him with fiendish yet self-righteous wrath.  We had closed to within ten feet when he made a diving roll to the right of our path.  To avoid the dune, I swerved left and we were momentarily weightless as the Jeep catapulted over its tapering extremity.
Kadiatu had giggled through this dark comedy as if it were a Laurel and Hardy routine.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Dehm boys dey run-O,” she shouted gleefully.
“We might have killed or maimed one of them.”
But she could not contain her hysterical laughter.
* * * * *
Christmas passed unheralded at Nolan’s place.  This was one of the hardest things to get used to in Sierra Leone.  I remembered spending one Christmas in Florida as a small boy, visiting with my parents an aunt I had never met; it seemed surreal—the warmth and sunshine.  Still, the hoopla about gifts, decorations on the streets and in the stores—all were omnipresent reminders of the holidays.  In Sierra Leone there was very little to remind one of the special reverence capitalism had bestowed on this day that I had been taught in college was once the festival of Saturnalia in ancient Rome. 
Nolan’s roommates had journeyed upcountry to visit friends, so we spent Christmas afternoon sipping gin and tonics in the living room and listening to Handel’s Messiah.  Even under the buzz of alcohol, I found that piece insufferably tedious, its one redeeming feature the “Hallelujah” chorus at the very end, perhaps Handel’s secret agenda all along.   When I told Nolan of the incident on the beach, he found the whole thing uproarious, which was a trifle unsettling since I had convinced myself that, had it not been for the beneficence of Lady Luck, neither I nor Kadiatu might still be around—at the very least, she raped and the “Piskoh” boy beaten senseless.  The night on the beach turned out to be one of those personal brushes with judgment that make you shake your head with wonder—and leave hopeful souls convinced their errand on earth is not yet finished.  
When I finally returned to Waterloo, Josh informed me that his and Michelle’s Christmas had provided at least one of the trappings of Christmas—carolers had visited the house, singing on the front steps at 2:00 a.m., Christmas morning.  They refused to leave.  Josh surmised they wanted a donation—“dash” in Krio lingo.  But angered by their persistence at that hour of the morning and the interruption of his sleep, he filled a bucket with leftover dishwater, toted it to the roof and dumped the contents on the unwary singers.  Learning of this ungracious prank the next morning upset Michelle.  It nearly ruined the reason for her having been invited to Waterloo, Josh’s best laid plans to propose marriage.  It took all of his considerable powers of persuasion to convince her he wasn’t the heartless Scrooge this act seemed to imply.
For some reason, Josh had not taken into consideration our water war with the village when making plans for Michelle’s visit to Waterloo.  They awoke the second morning to find the water turned off again.  Someone had upped the ante this time, however, and in the spirit of Christmas had broken off the handle on the valve.  Josh had to borrow a wrench from the Cliffords to open it.  Malcolm suggested we purchase a water tank to insure a more continuous supply.
Fudia had also paid them a visit Christmas day, pestering Josh for more milk.  Josh had ample reason to play Scrooge once more since there still was no milk in the house, but when Michelle learned of the circumstances, she insisted they give the girl money instead.  Thus, in a precedent we would soon regret, they gave her five shillings, reasoning the family would surely be able to purchase milk in the village.
I, in turn, related to Josh in considerable detail the episode on the beach.  His take, entirely different from Nolan’s, prompted the lecture I had expected earlier when I had first informed him of my involvement with Kadiatu.  If I didn’t cool it with this schoolgirl, I was bound to get “my writ in a tinger,” if not something worse.  What the hell was I thinking, getting sexually involved with an African student, and Clifford’s protégée at that?
When I asked if he had proposed to Michelle, he said no—too many things had conspired to ruin the mood.  The final nail that coffined his plans was an unannounced visit from Orville, who, surprised by Michelle’s presence and my absence, wondered out loud to them about their sleeping arrangements, and what might be Clifford’s reaction if he knew the two of them were sleeping under the same roof without the blessing of the church (which church, he did not say).  At first, I welcomed the news that, at least for the time being, we would not be a threesome in Waterloo, but then wondered how many more times I would have to do my disappearing act, when or if Michelle visited Waterloo again.


Chapter 24


Remember the Paul Williams song written back in 1974 and made popular by Helen Reddy—“You and Me Against the World”?  

I’ve had bad hearing for nearly two-thirds of my life, never even aware of it till I was rejected for military service when summoned to have my physical exam after my return from Sierra Leone in 1964.  Basically, I’m deaf above 4,500 cycles per second.  In normal conversation with little or no background noise, I can cope, but over the years it has become increasingly difficult for me to distinguish those common consonant stops like “p” and “b,” or “t” and “d.”   The problem became more pronounced when listening to musical lyrics, for there is always the background noise of the music itself and, with the advent of the 1960’s, the lyrics of Rock & Roll and Folk artists became so riddled with clandestine allusions and symbols that I began, unconsciously, to tune out the most of the words.  In retrospect, “You and Me Against the World” wasn’t that difficult to understand, but I simply focused my attention on those first six words, assuming for years the song had to be about two lovers, like Kadiatu and myself, who found themselves pitted against the larger cultural forces of the world, an idea that found currency in so many of the world’s love stories from Romeo and Juliet to Madame Butterfly.  I had no idea that “You and Me Against the World” celebrated the relationship between a single parent and child.

The night that Kadiatu and I were attacked on Lumley Beach should have been the red flag that told us to stop our ongoing association or, at the very least, proceed with extreme caution.  Instead, it seemed to accelerate our desire for each other’s company as we joined that exclusive club of “star-crossed” lovers.  Instead of signaling the pitfalls and dangers that lay ahead, the event served only to increase our need for each other, our relationship pitted as it was against the seeming bias of the world.  So it should not come as a surprise that we immediately began to lay plans for yet another chance to be alone together and discover where our passion for each other would take us.  

New Year’s Eve provided such an occasion: a party was planned by the PC girls at Michelle’s place in Freetown.  Everybody and their dog had been invited: PC brass, fellow Volunteers, VSO’s, and a few Syrian business men who would pit-roast a pig for the occasion and provide the booze.  Think Hawaiian luau.
I really didn’t want to attend this affair, for I was beginning to feel alienated from social gatherings made up almost exclusively of expatriates.  So even though I had been invited by Josh and Michelle, Kadiatu and I made plans to try our luck once more.  This time, I didn’t hesitate to preempt Josh’s claims on the Jeep.  I offered to pick him up and drive him back to Waterloo, but I would most likely be late to the party.
The Colony Mountains above Freetown seemed like a tempting location to seek out a lover’s lane.  After all, Sierra Leone’s movers and shakers lived up there in secure proximity to the Wilberforce Barracks and Fourah Bay College.  We didn’t want another encounter with misfortune like the assault at Lumley Beach.  I had crossed that choice off the list of romantic sites to park for the present and foreseeable future.  Most Africans possessed a cultural aversion to the mountains at night, frightened away by bits of folklore concerning who and what inhabited them.  An added bonus was the delicious coolness of the night air at that altitude.
So that night we made the torturous climb up the switchbacks, past Wilberforce, winding higher and farther into the mountains.  I didn’t know it then, but this was the road that eventually descended from the mountains to that very spot where Christiana and I had pulled over, and the same daunting road that Ron and I had tried to ferry the hitchhiker and his family up on my very first trip to Waterloo.  
We drove until the houses thinned and then vanished altogether and the road became nearly a tunnel in the forest.  I found an auspicious looking dirt turnoff and we forged along a badly rutted lane for about half a mile to a place which provided a wedge-like view of Freetown’s lights winking in the distance.  The surrounding silence and darkness closed upon us like a blanket as I shut off the motor and cut the lights.
“Better shut your window and lock the door.”
Mutely, she did as she was told.  Sealed in the front seat of our metal sanctum, I grasped the shoulder farthest from me, turning her body, and we fell to the routine we had rehearsed so many times on the small lane that ascended to the Clifford’s residence.   A tantalizing, faint aroma, not unlike those orange blossoms I had smelled the first day I set foot in Africa, floated like an aura above the flesh of her neck and ear lobes.
“Did you buy perfume today?”
She said “yes” with a solicitous innocence that stirred me even more.  It was time to retire to the bedroom I had fashioned in the back of the Jeep the week before, and, unlike the night with Christiana, I was the first to climb over the seat.  The Jeep had become stuffy, however, so—tempting fate—I opened one of the sliding rear windows, contemplating, as I did so, how it could be slammed shut in one swift finger-smashing motion on the hand of any unwelcome prowler.
We rolled over and under one another for several minutes like caged wrestlers.  Once, when she had pinned me beneath her, the weight of her body kept rubbing against my hardening manhood and it began throbbing like a lighted fuse.  No, I screamed inwardly—I can’t go off in my pants!  I rolled her over roughly on her back, rising to my knees, fighting to keep her hands away from the zipper on my fly.  Just as I had pinned her arms over her head, I thought I heard something outside.  
Holding my finger over my lips, I shushed her to silence and we lay there in the oppressive darkness, hearing only the incessant threnody of insects.  Gradually, another faint sound separated itself: the footfall of something on two legs approaching the Jeep from the rear.  I rose up on an elbow and, as noiselessly as possible, slid the side window shut.  We waited, our breaths suspended, trying to rein in the runaway gallop of our hearts, prepared to bolt for the front seat. 
The nose of the Jeep was pointed toward the road in preparation for a quick getaway.  A dark form passed alongside and, then, in front of the vehicle without the least hesitancy in its gait.  Whoever it was clearly had to have noticed the alien presence parked there in the woods, but, for whatever reason, the steady rhythm of the steps continued unabated.  In the space of minutes—that somewhere witnessed the explosion of stars, unseen planets spinning madly on their axes, the trackless creep of our galaxy through eternity’s seas—the footsteps fell past hearing.
“Let’s get outa here,” I hissed.  “I didn’t think anyone would be on this road at night.”
Her reaction surprised me.  “It’s just a villager . . . going home from work at Wilberforce or one of the homes we passed.”
He was the bogeyman as far as I was concerned.  “There’s a village up here and he’s returning from work at this time of night?  I thought this was a forest preserve.”
“Many people live in the mountains.  The village of Regent is not far.”
“So you know this road?”
“No,” she said coyly.
“Then how do you know there’s a village and he is returning from work and all that other business?”
“Are you afraid in the mountains?”
“Well, I didn’t used to be afraid of Lumley Beach, but you remember what happened there!”
“Boys will not be walking this road at night.  They are afraid.” 
The subtext of her response seemed to be that I was acting like a boy.  She hesitated a moment.  “I would be afraid if you were not here.”
And I would be afraid if you were not here.  Ah, the sweet fugue of minds in concert.  She began to undress.
“What are you doing?”
No answer.  She was already reaching behind her back, her dexterous fingers unhooking the clasps of her bra, then bridging on her shoulders and heels to slip the snug fitting panties over her thighs.  She sat up to pull them over her feet—so much spontaneous trust and faith, such freedom from the silly scruples that had painted fig leaves over my images of human nakedness.   Drawing upon my gratitude for the bounty of her body, I pulled her to me.  In that moment, sealed tombs swung open within as I nuzzled and sucked at the fruits of her body.  She, in turn, swayed and buckled like a sapling caught in the wind of my desire.  From the present prospect some fifty years distant, Robert Frost’s benediction upon such bountiful moments of our living still rings in my ears: “So was I once a swinger of birches.”
“We must be careful,” I whispered in her ear.  I still had not undressed completely.  I felt Christiana’s eyes looking down upon us from the sickbed of the “belli,” blood pooling on the sheets and mattress, a lumpish embryo, like some Cambrian invertebrate, lying inert in the corner of a white, kidney-shaped pan.
“I will not get the belli.”
“How do you know?”
“It is not time.”
Then she said “please” and the sweet flame of giving enveloped the remaining embers of restraint.  At the threshold of earth’s secret fecundity, the night bowed away and I felt my sperm cold and jellied in my underpants.  She fumbled in my underpants for my wilting manhood, trying desperately to steer it to the burrow of her own pleasure.
“I have to pee,” I said, more in embarrassment than distress.  Clutching my boxer shorts I waddled from the Jeep, my bare feet tightrope walking the rocky surface of the road to that distance appointed by modesty.
When I finally returned, she was lying just as I had left her and, after an unspoken truce, we felt to wrestling again.  I struggled to subdue the rising shivers that shook my naked body in the cool mountain air.  Twice she grabbed my reluctant soldier, vainly trying to direct him to the opening gates of paradise, but to no avail.  Her effort foiled, at last she lay back completely passive, resisting all of the finest movements in my impoverished repertoire of amore.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, plaintively.
There was a damning utter silence for at least five minutes.
“Are you mad at me?”
Still no reply.  “What’s wrong?” as if I didn’t know.  Please say something!  Talk to me—anything but this silence.
“Hey, Bo!” she barked crossly.  “Yu de go na yu pants, but yu noh de kam insai mi.”
The words rattled in the black silence like bullets from an automatic rifle as she rolled away from me to face the side of the Jeep, mumbling something.
“What?”
“A se . . . yu noh de lohv mi!”
Incensed, I shot back.  “You’re the one that’s lying there like a sack of rice.”
She rolled her head back and forth violently on the ribbed floor of the Jeep.  “Noh to mi-O.”  She pointed at my limp pecker.  “Na dis theng.  E noh de go.  Yu noh de geht di lohv foh mi.”
“All peckers shrivel after they go off.”
“I dohn brok.  I noh de go afta,” she retorted in hurt tones.
“It just takes time,” I replied softly.
“Yu noh di man, or yu noh de luv mi.”
Lest it be thought that my purpose for writing this narrative is to titillate the reader with graphic descriptions of my hapless attempts to get “laid,” I will forgo any description of what happened next.  I would have to invent those details in any case, for, truth be told, I have managed to repress the particulars of how passion finally trumped my impotence—for reasons that I hope will become clear latter in this narrative. 
Nonetheless, I was possessed that night and in the following weeks by the conviction that in the détente succeeding our lovers’ quarrel I had at last discovered earth’s long hoarded secret—buried from prying eyes in Victorian codes of decorum, yet celebrated in the encrypted paeans of novels, songs, and poetry that stretched back into the blind reaches of unrecorded time.  I believed I had entered woman: groping along the aching labyrinth of desire, I had reached that “still place of the turning world,” in its carnal sense.  I had found the grail of manhood.
I lay there in the back of the Jeep, rapt by love’s ode to mankind’s joy, gazing down upon a vista no longer veiled by the mists of enigma.  I had been to the mountain; I was no longer a work in progress, for the dual joys of a peace “that passeth understanding” and exultation pervaded every nerve in my being.  Somewhere in the Prufrockian maze of “half-deserted streets” and “muttering retreats,” I had reclaimed Eden in the arms of a young black woman, and the bright miracle of it dazzled the dark foreboding that had bedeviled my consciousness of Africa.
We dressed and drove back down the torturous switchbacks to Freetown.  After depositing her once more at the Cotton Tree and giving her fare for a cab, I drove to Michelle’s to collect Josh.  When I arrived the party was still going strong despite the food being nearly gone—couples shuffled and swayed to Highlife music, booze flowed, high pitched feminine laughter floated upward, piercing the music and chatter.  I squeezed my way into the kitchen and, with some temerity, pulled a piece of the remnants of white meat from the gutted pig carcass lying on the table.  Transported by the taste—the gustatory equivalent of the euphoria I had just experienced with Kadiatu—I tore off another piece.
Everyone seemed to be drunk or pretending to be.  John, the Assistant Rep., had a young VSO up against a wall, caressing her breasts.  She had her eyes half closed like a cat having its stomach rubbed when suddenly she became aware of my sober assessment of her pleasure.  She squealed and John staggered back a few steps to the laughter of those nearby.
John grabbed my arm as I tried to shove through the throng.  “Hey, where you been, Dr. Livingston?”
I stared at his hand until he removed it.  “To the mountain,” I muttered.
* * * * *
Irony can sometimes be as emasculating as a swift kick to the nuts.  The next morning, back in Waterloo, wanting desperately to sleep in, I awoke to the blazing sun’s hot rays toasting my pillow.  Groggily, I padded into the dining room, checked to see if Josh was still asleep, which he was.  I went to the kitchen and opened the door to the fridge only to stand there staring dumbly at its desultory contents: aging remainders of condiments like mustard, ketchup, Tabasco sauce; a bottle of French vinaigrette salad dressing that Josh used as a marinade (eating salads was a no-no in West Africa), a half-empty jug of already mixed powdered milk, 4 bottles of Star Beer, a bottle of lemon-lime squash and another of orange, an open box of imported Danish chocolates, a stale loaf of Italian bread, and three bruised bananas freckled with age.  The memory of that succulent pig hung like an aura along my taste buds.
A knock came at the back door.  Fudia stood in the bright sun cupping her hands around her eyes and pressing her face against the glass to block out her reflection.  “Mr. Livingston, open the door!”
“What do you want?” I yelled, grabbing the orange squash from the fridge and tearing off one of the bananas.
“Please, Mr. Livingston, will you give me ten bob?”
“Wettin do?”
“Foh milk . . .  foh di bebi.”
I looked up in the food locker and saw we had a new tin of Klim.  “I will give you the milk.”
“Mama say she want ten bob.”
I still hadn’t opened the door.  “Then you would have to go buy the milk.  I will save you a trip to town.”
“Please, Mr. Livingston,” she whined petulantly.
“Go tell your mama, if she wants milk I will give it to her.  No money.”
“Please, Mr. Livingston.”
“No,” I replied sharply and carried my drink into the dining room, ignoring the continued knocking at the back door.  Finally, I heard her retreating footfall on the rear steps.
Josh still hadn’t awakened.  Having downed my breakfast, I decided to walk to the post office to collect the mail.  It was already hot outside and the treeless landscape afforded no shade as I clopped across the tacky tarmac.  My sandals, like little garden trowels, scooped up particles of grit with each step on the dusty road into town.  I tried to comfort myself with that infamous self-delusion coined by Phoenicians in Arizona: It’s a dry heat. 
The moods of our bipolar postmaster, who generally liked to trade lewd jests with his “Piskoh padi,” had proved unpredictable.  There were days when he sat motionless behind his desk, his eyes with their yellowed whites fixed glumly on the back of the service counter, refusing to acknowledge my presence.  Those were the days when I had to be stern with Mr. Sankoh, asserting my white hegemony in order to get him to retrieve my mail.  I was reminded of another sign so common in rural businesses stateside: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”  It was the kind of passive contempt one sometimes experienced from African clerks in Freetown shops.  The flip side of this personality, the affable Pa Sankoh, dearly loved his “ohmohle”—a super potent distillation of palm wine—which buzzed him into a manic orbit where he would befriend white devils like myself.  The marvel was his ability to retain this prized sinecure as Waterloo’s postmaster. 
That day he was in a droll humor, bustling about the office, sorting mail while humming disconnected snatches of Sierra Leone’s national anthem.  He had seen me approaching on foot and grasped a blue aerogramme ready to hand me as I approached the counter.
“Kusheh, padi.”
“Kusheh pa.”
“Ow di bodi?”
“Di bodi sohfa na dis hit.”
“Ah-ha,” he chortled, handing me the aerogramme with a flourish.  “Dis lehta na yu Amehrika titi go mak yu betta.”
The ohmohle had evidently bestowed upon him powers of clairvoyance, for there in the return address was Diane’s name and a street address in Jackson, Missouri.  Disquieted, I squinted again at the name and address trying to X-ray the contents of the small, nearly weightless missive in my hand. 
“Tenki Pa, wi go si bak,” I said stumbling out the door into the blinding sun- bleached street.
I wanted to open it immediately, but discipline was the order of the day—wait until you reach the privacy and comfort of the house.  But at the fourteenth step of the staircase to the house I could wait no longer and plunked my butt down on the stoop, my fingers fidgeting to break the seal on the fragile envelope without tearing it.
Dear Stephen,
I started to write the day I got your letter, and then got tired of looking up every other word up in the dictionery (remember, I’m a geology major) but I finally got disgusted with that and quit.  Now I feel so bad about not having writen sooner that I’m just going to town—poor spelling, poor grammer, and all.
Life on campus at Mizzou has been horid this year.  I hate chemistry, I hate Trigonometry and I hate everything else because of them.  They have absolutely ruined my rosey outlook on life.  Consequently, I don’t think I’ll live until this semester is over because I also have two FRUIT education courses.
I’m writnig this letter (and please forgive it if it sounds a little incoherant) at this particular time because xxx to express it in your terms, I am filled (overflowing) with a laytent desire to communicate.  It happens to be, tonite, one of those wonderful times that nature really causes you juices to run.   Mine happen to be running-I just went for a walk like we used to do and just enjoyed the beauties of spring and felt very alive and then decided to write you.
SO, here you are—seeing the ALIVE side of me that I keep hidden except on very rare occasion.  I do hope that you don’t mind, but it’s soooooooooo much easier to write when you don’t have to worry about spelling the words correctly.
When will you be leaving your little heaven their in Africa?  I took it from your letter that it would be sometime in the summer.  Do you still plan to go to Mexico?
Write if you have a day with no papers to grade.  I am enclosing my address both here at the university and also my home address in Jackson.  Did I mention I’m going to Europe this summer?  Must get some sleep.  Sorry I took so long about answering.
The Keeper of the Dentures
The uncomplimentary closing was a reference to our inside joke.  She had such a radiant, disarming smile, I once accused her of having dentures.  She took the remark in the manner it was intended, a backhanded compliment.
I kept pouring over some of the phrasing in the letter: “I am filled (overflowing) with a laytent desire to communicate”; “one of those wonderful times that nature really causes your juices to run”; “So, here you are—seeing the ALIVE side of me that I keep hidden except on very rare occasion.”  What encrypted message lay behind these words?  She loves me . . . she loves me not.  What did it all mean? In the space of a few fleeting seconds, as I sat pondering that question, Sierra Leone, Waterloo, Peninsula Secondary School, and Kadiatu—all the fixtures of my brave new world had been driven from my mind.
The love making Kadiatu and I had enjoyed the night before now had a vicarious, surreal quality about it.  As I looked up from the letter at the parched landscape surrounding the house, I shook my head in response to an invisible yet nagging inquisitor—What really happened last night in the Jeep on the mountain?  There was the dim sense that some irrevocable sea change had occurred in my life putting not only the distance of the Atlantic between myself and Diane, but light years of ideological distance because of this choice I had made. And I felt in my gut a similar gulf now separated me from my family, my fellow Volunteers, and the role I had been selected by the Peace Corps to play in West Africa.  What the hell did I do last night?
* * * * *
Orville paid me a visit that afternoon.  I wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat but I knew something troubled him, for he rarely ventured from the security of his bungalow, especially to visit Josh or me when his daily teaching duties had concluded.  Josh and I had been too caught up in our own pursuits to give much thought to Orville’s daily existence.  He had his thesis to worry about and we had our dalliances with women.  He didn’t complain and we didn’t inquire.  We half supposed that he most likely viewed our living quarters as off limits: a den of iniquity, especially since his remark to Josh and Michelle about their cohabitation during the week of Christmas.  And then there was the matter of young Joseph’s testimony against Alimamy in the “trial” following the theft from the school office.  He knew the boy’s lies rankled me, yet he still employed Joseph.
I returned the favor he had accorded me when I had visited his bungalow by asking if I could get him something to drink.  He politely refused, however, and we sat uncomfortably examining our folded hands at the dining room table.
“So how is the thesis going?” I asked, groping for some neutral ground where we might bridge the unspoken tension separating us.
“It’s not,” he replied morosely.  “I’ve grown tired of pretending I’m even remotely interested in the topic.  I should have finished it before I came to Sierra Leone . . . when I had no firsthand knowledge of the topic’s utter irrelevance.”
“Why do you think it’s irrelevant?”
He sighed.  “Pedar Knudsen persuaded me to take a break from my studies; he wanted me to accompany him to Masanga.  He can be very persuasive—said I needed to get out of my ivy tower and see the real Africa.  I hate to say this, but I think he believed I might be of some assistance in persuading my father to okay the funding for the Adventist’s takeover of the leper colony.”
I tried my best to hold my peace, to keep the knowing smirk from invading my face.  “You met Dr. Dixon and his wife then?”
“Yes, they’re awesome.  They’re what I’d call ‘real’ missionaries: healing, comforting, without presuming to wear their compassion for those poor miserable people like a merit badge.  They made me feel . . . a bit of a fraud.”
I confess, I hadn’t thought Orville capable of this kind of self-analysis.  
“What am I giving these people?  I’ve been so wrapped up in writing my thesis, so afraid of meeting Africans on their terms rather than mine.  I know so little of the hardships they’ve endured.  I tried that interview thing you suggested, getting the kids to open up a little about their personal lives, only I had them write the answers down.  Golly, if experience is any index of wisdom, they should have gray hairs.  It seems like all of them have lost one of their parents, mostly the fathers.  Some of them haven’t been home all year; many live with distant relatives who work them like slaves for their room and board.  How could I possibly be their mentor?  This is the first time in my life that I’ve been on my own.”
I considered a moment before responding, trying to summon some empathy for his plight.  “They don’t measure you by the yardstick of experience.  They’ve probably never even asked themselves how your life might have been different from theirs.  Many might even assume that you are also without a father.  What they think they know is by the accident of being born in America you hold the keys to a way of life they can barely hold in their imaginations.  Their access to you in the classroom is like having a relative who is a paramount chief.  They think—no, they believe—school is the yellow brick road, and you’re the Wizard.”
“But that’s no comfort.  I mean their ignorance of the knowledge I’m trying to impart seems so abysmal at times it’s difficult to face day in and day out.  I mean, where do you begin?  Let’s face it—I’m no martyr.”
“But you’re their portrait of the possibilities life has to offer.  Your presence makes them aware of something that never dawned on their forefathers: that there may be a way out of the everlasting cycle of subsistence.  The real problem is they’ve developed little or no self-consciousness about how long the road ahead of them is, nor what will happen to them during that journey—or even the true desirability of their destination.  Have you ever heard of the author Chinua Achebe?”
“I believe I’ve heard the name.  If he’s a novelist though, I wouldn’t have read any of his work.”
“He has a new book out that shows how terrifying it is for an African with an advanced liberal arts education to return to his native land.  His writing stirred memories of the difficulty I had relating to my parents and my high school peers whenever I returned from college.”
“Yeah, that’s true.  I mean I went to an Adventist university in Maryland, but even there questions were raised that had never entered my mind before.  That’s when I first got to know Malcolm.  He was my history professor; his classroom was one of those rare opportunities to think for yourself.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, without thinking.
Orville frowned a moment at my response.  “I suppose your knowing him only at Peninsula has given you a different impression.  But he was terrific, at least among the teachers I had.   Africa, or something, has changed him.  He’s not the same person I knew back in the States.”
Were we talking about the same man?  I thought of Clifford’s face as he chased young Santigie around the desk in his office and the incident during our football game with Bishop Johnson’s team.  What if Orville, or even Lydia, had seen the savage rage in Clifford’s face that day in the office?  Could they have acknowledged it was the Malcolm they knew?  Or suppose I described the incident to Orville—would he even believe me?
Orville toyed with a “church key” that had been left on the dining room table.  “I used to think the Cliffords were the greatest couple.  Before Gavin was born, Malcolm used to take me camping.  He was so into nature and so popular with his students, so ‘open’.”
The ice was getting thin in our conversation, but I felt compelled to speak my mind.  “I can’t say that I would call him ‘open’ since I’ve known him.”
“I’d have to agree with you if I made a judgment based on these past few months.  It’s become increasingly difficult to have meaningful conversations with him anymore—even with Lydia.  It’s as if they see their role here like some existential trial: Sisyphus, forever rolling the stone up the hill only to have it roll back down again.  They keep repeating the same old generalizations about the lack of common sense in Africans, that they can’t be trusted because they lie and steal, that the notion of Sierra Leone’s independence is a page from The Emperor’s New Clothes.
“Well you, yourself, just spoke of the abysmal ignorance of your ‘scholars’.”
“I know; I know.  It’s like some airborne disease; it’s catching if you’re around it.”
“How long has it been since you knew him in college?”
“Let me see . . . he was in Liberia for three years . . . and he’s been in Sierra Leone for two and a half,” he said as his eyes met mine.  “Do you think Africa can change a person?”
“Well, if novels are any indication, the answer is a resounding yes.”
“I don’t read novels, but I’m scared, Stephen.  I’m scared for Malcolm . . . I’m scared for myself.  I keep thinking what if I’m changing—imperceptibly—little by little.  You don’t know how much he’s changed.  He has nothing good to say about Africa or Africans, or anyone black for that matter.  Whenever we talk he somehow always gets sidetracked into putting them down because they’re lazy or stupid, conniving, spineless.  It’s hard to believe he was a champion of civil rights, especially of Negroes, in the U.S.  He told us all about the role of William Wilberforce in getting the British Parliament to outlaw the slave trade.  I’ll always remember him asking our class one day if we had ever considered why one so seldom saw Negroes on American highways—you know, for Sunday drives or on vacations.  That’s the kind of stimulant he was; now it almost seems he’s 180 degrees from that.  Sure, there are things wrong with Africa and Africans, but he makes out like there’s some hidden conspiracy against anything we try to do for them, whether it’s education, progress in general, or saving their souls.”
I decided to risk telling him about the incident with Santigie.
“My God, Stephen, have you told anyone else about this?  I can’t believe it: he used to pale at the very thought of corporal punishment.”
“When I first came to Peninsula, my former roommate, Ron, told me he was very strict about the African teachers’ fondness for caning.  He chastised Ms. Conte and Koker for resorting to the cane in their instruction.  Ron told me Conte used to stand behind students working at the black board in her French class.  A mistake brought the thwack of the cane on their shoulders.  Koker’s variation on this was to have them hold out their hands.  Clifford told them he’d fire them if he caught them doing it again.  But a few months later the caning started again, clandestinely of course.  Clifford never put a stop to it, though he couldn’t have helped knowing about it.”
“That’s what scares me, Stephen.”
    “Well, the good news is, he’s going back to jolly old England in a couple of weeks.  Let’s hope he can regain his equilibrium when he puts West Africa behind him.”
“My God, you really don’t like him, do you?  I mean, how did you get to be so cynical?  He’s given the best years of his life bringing education to Africa.  Doesn’t he deserve a little slack?”
“Like you said, cynicism’s contagious in this climate—‘airborne,’ wasn’t that your word?”


                               Chapter 25













Address






Delivered by The Board of Governors
of the 

Peninsula Secondary School, Waterloo 

and the 

Seventh Day Adventist Denomination, 

on the Occasion of the Farewell Ceremony 
to Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Clifford, First Principal of the School 
and Mr. Livingston, Peace Corps Teacher,
and also Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Lyon, 
the New Principal

Seated in a metal folding chair, my scalp tingling as it baked in the January afternoon sun directly overhead—“Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun”—my thoughts dwelt obsessively on shade (and toyed with regret that for some reason most young American men viewed carrying an umbrella, especially to ward off the sun’s rays, as unmanly as carrying a purse).  
Honourable Minister of Finance and Development—Ladies and Gentlemen—
this, of course, the obligatory nod to the dignitary in the dark suit whose pretentious black Mercedes had usurped an unwarranted amount of space in Peninsula’s tiny parking lot, forcing others to park their vehicles along the highway.  Apparently the blood of dignitaries ran rich with masochism; either that or they were not aware of the physics of dark colors in sunlight.  I glanced over at Josh, who appeared to be suffering more than I, the sweat trickling down the shadow of his sideburns.  Orville occupied a folding chair across the aisle from us, sandwiched between Ms. Cummings-John and Ms. Conte.  Malcolm, ramrod erect in the front row, maintaining the British stiff upper lip, tried to ignore the antics of young Gavin, leaving discipline to Frida.  At the moment Gavin, his neck swiveling like a radar dish from side to side, was on his knees in the metal chair facing away from the speaker’s dais, scrutinizing with curiosity the black faces assembled in his father’s honor.
One has said that parting is a sweet sorrow.  This is certainly true today at our farewell meeting with the Clifford family.  We have sorrow because a leader and friend is leaving—we shall no longer see his energetic figure in this area.  But our sorrow is sweet because his work will remain as a worthy memorial of three years devoted labour.
Of the Clifford’s it can be said “They came, they saw and they conquered.” When they accepted the call to pioneer in the new Peninsula Secondary School, this place where we are gathered today was “bush” and the classes were held in Mrs. S.T. Smart’s house at Prince Alfred Road.  But outstanding features like a strong faith in God, a good academic background, a practical hand, an inexhaustible amount of energy. and a sense of economy have in the short span of time changed this place from “bush” to a flourishing and busy Secondary School with five classrooms, laboratory, Domestic Science room, offices and library.  The Clifford family never spared themselves.  They are people that like to get things done.  We could always find Mr. Clifford working for the school in the classroom or on the compound, at his office, at different departments in Freetown and in the evening at his home.  At the same time he has been to both the staff and students an example of a true Christian gentleman.
It seemed rather odd, the reference to Malcolm as “Principal” instead of Headmaster.  I did my best to keep my eyes from rolling heavenward as the inane plaudits rolled off the speaker’s tongue.   While Mr. Kanu, the Chair of the Rural Council, droned on about the contributions of the principal’s wife, Mrs. Clifford, about the Finance Minister’s support of the school, and of the new job that Malcolm would be taking as head of the History Department at a college in England, it was difficult to suppress my own perceptions of Malcolm’s behavior as a “true Christian gentleman.”  
The Principal has himself expressed the wish that we include Mr. S. Livingston in the farewell address.  He came here as a Peace Corps Volunteer and has been working in the Peninsula Secondary School with a zeal and interest that would be worthy of any missionary.  Mr. S. Livingston has been an excellent Games Master.  As Science teacher he has built up the Science Department from scratch to be adequate for the school and very helpful in the teaching of the students.  Mention should also be made of the many hours after classes he has spent in helping individual students with their lessons.  As he leaves to go for further studies in U.S.A., we thank him for two years excellent service and wish him success.
The words startled me from my stupor.  My ego surged—the sovereign thrill of being singled out for recognition on this special occasion in the headmaster’s honor—even though I wasn’t leaving for another five months.  But the cresting excitement quickly ebbed, an undertow of chagrin sucking at the sands of undeserved vanity.  The list of my purported accomplishments, especially the reference to “the many hours after classes he has spent in helping individual students with their lessons,” rang hollow.  Irony had set its barb in me this time.  
I had never expected public acknowledgement of my labors at Peninsula, not, anyway, by our distinguished speaker who obviously had been prompted by Malcolm Clifford to say these things.  The “many hours” after classes tutoring individual students?  Well, yes, I had helped Samuel and Alimamy at various times with their studies.  When I first came to Waterloo, I had tried to tutor a fragile-looking young teacher at the Waterloo Grammar School with his English so he could pass his sixth form exams.  But the poor fellow could barely hold his eyes open for the duration of each afternoon’s lesson, and it put me in mind of the lone sarcastic remark that had once come from Orville’s mouth: “I think one-third of my students must be suffering from sleeping sickness.  They can’t stay awake in class.”
The reference to helping students with their studies after class flared in the space between my ears—it had to be Malcolm’s reference to my attempts to tutor Kadiatu.  My face flushed with newfound shame: I had given little thought to how this man’s trust had been betrayed.  My utmost concern had been to avoid getting caught.  I had cast stones at the hypocrisy of those words  identifying him as a “true Christian gentleman.”  Now, my nakedness in the glass house I occupied was under siege.  “What goes around comes around.”  The euphoric image of making love to Kadiatu in the Colony Mountains had been stained by the speaker’s appropriated praise, praise that could only have come from Malcolm.  I glanced over at Josh who flashed a smile, giving me two thumbs up.  If only it were possible at times like this to switch off the damning recriminations of human regret.  The afternoon froze in the sun’s amber glare, and I wanted nothing more than to dissolve into the sweat pouring from my body.
We are gathered here to say Good-bye and Welcome.  We do all this because we are interested in Peninsula Secondary School.  Therefore in conclusion: God bless Peninsula Secondary School, its Board, staff, students and everyone connected with it.  May it still grow to train men and women to serve their God and country.
The kind hand of time has erased from memory the remaining details of that ceremony.  I only recall that as the proceedings concluded, Mohammed Mansaray walked up to the speaker’s dais to present Malcolm with a gift from well wishers and the student body.  As Samuel had done for Ron, Mohammed helped Malcolm into the robe of a Paramount Chief.  But instead of being fashioned from simple country cloth, this one was as regal in craftsmanship and design as anything I had ever laid eyes on.
Seeking refuge from the unctuous hand-shaking and well-wishing that would follow the ceremony, I made my exit as quickly and furtively as possible.  How could I shake hands with Malcolm, look him in the face and he not see the scarlet letters of guilt engraved there?   I trudged ahead of Josh toward the parking lot only to hear Malcolm calling out as he jogged across the football field, his new robe flapping under his arms like untrimmed sails in an errant breeze.
“Stephen, here . . . I wanted you to have this.”  Breathlessly, he held forth a copy of the farewell address printed on parchment paper and signed by the dignitaries present.
I stood there staring dumbly at the document for a minute.  When I had mustered the bold hypocrisy to raise my eyes to his face I saw something I had never seen before.  That grim sardonic grin—the very flag, it had seemed, of the tug of war in Malcolm’s personality—had been transformed into a benign, almost paternal smile, a smile of artless faith, the smile of one, it seemed to me, who had never bitten into skepticism’s forbidden fruit.  For weeks I had lived with the vain fear that the revelation of my transgressions lay in ambush in each meeting, however brief, with this man.  But his remoteness from the students, from Africa itself, as he sat within the barred inner sanctum of his school office or at home on the hilltop premises of the former District Commissioner’s mansion, had protected him and, in some unaccountable perversion of fate, kept my trespasses hidden.
“Thank you,” I finally half muttered.
He clasped one of my shoulders in the slender, long fingers—the equivalent of a British hug.  “It is we who owe you thanks,” he returned.  “I’m afraid it’s a very small token of the gratitude that is due you, but it comes from the heart.”
There are moments in life that bring a barely perceptible pressure to the eyes and, given time, they begin to leak.  Was it the sudden unexpected display of some island within Malcolm’s being that I had never seen before?  Or was it my own coming of age, the discovery that I, too, had starred in the role of hypocrite?  Or could it have been some inexplicable amalgam of both that now blurred my vision?

* * * * *

Josh and I had been taking what my mother called sponge baths, using small wash pans of red-tinted water to flush the Harmattan’s dust from our orifices and pores.  On weekends he would shower at Michelle’s.  One day, unable to take it any longer, he announced he was headed to Freetown to purchase a water tank.  I argued that soon there might be no more water at all flowing through the pipe even if the valve in the field was left open.  What then?  Unsure, he vowed if push came to shove, he’d have it shipped in or form a bucket brigade.  He wanted to place the tank on the roof above the bathroom; he had seen one with a float valve on it like those on a toilet tank.  His plan was simple: during daylight hours, we would open the valve in the field with a wrench and allow the tank to fill with water.  He figured a two hundred gallon tank would probably last us a week if we were careful.  The purchase of the tank, valve, pipe and delivery would cost about £100.  Mr. Lyon, the new principal, had expressed a willingness to pitch in £30.  How much could I manage to contribute to this enterprise?
I reiterated what he already knew: I had managed to run up a bill at Chellerams for over £90.  In fact, since Josh frequented Freetown each weekend, he now did all the grocery shopping.  Lately, he had reported the manager of Chellerams had badgered him about a certain Stephen Livingston, another Peace Corps Volunteer.  Did he know Mr. Livingston or his whereabouts?  If he happened to encounter Mr. Livingston, would he inform him that his account was long past due and his credit no longer good in the store?
I gave Josh the last £15 in my possession towards the purchase of a tank and pledged another 15 more when our next monthly check came.  If he really deemed the water tank a vital necessity, he would have to come up with the remainder.  A week later the open-topped metal tank arrived by lorry, and somehow we managed, with the help of Alimamy and Santigie, to raise it to the flat rooftop.  Judging by its size, I feared our roof might not be able to bear the weight of a completely filled tank and suggested we try filling it gradually rather than all at once.
We celebrated our first shower in Waterloo in over a month on Valentine’s day of 1964.  Invigorated by the refreshingly simple miracle of a stream of water raining down on my flesh, even if tainted red, I grudgingly admitted it seemed a worthy purchase.  We would have to wait and see, however, what the dry season had in store for us. 
Fudia continued to plague us for money, so we kept the back door locked.  One day a knock came at the front door.  Fudia’s mother stood at the door staring stonily into the distance. I opened the door and, with demonstrated reluctance, invited her in.  While ushering her into the living room, I detected the smell of alcohol on her breath.  The odor brought to mind the image of Mr. Kande’s drunk wife and the disastrous dinner at their Waterloo home.  Within seconds, the wheels of deduction, oiled by skepticism, began to shape a hypothesis: might the purchase of alcohol lay behind this woman’s insistence that we give her money instead of the powdered milk I had offered her daughter?
Her demeanor that day teetered between a drowsy sullenness and lapses into undisguised coquetry.  Our communication, limited as it was by my woeful Krio and her slurred delivery, fell into silence.  I excused myself to go to the kitchen to measure out a portion of powdered milk into a plastic container.  Hearing a noise at the entrance to the kitchen, I turned, surprised to find her standing in the doorway.
“Wetin du?” she inquired.
I pressed the container of powdered milk into her hands.  “Foh di babi.”
“Masi, masa,” she complained.  “A nid bohb.”
“No bob . . . no money!” I replied sharply.  
She stared at the container in her hands despondently.
“Yu tek milk,” I said, unlocking the door at the steps leading down to their dwelling.  “Go.  No moh palaba.”
The murky-yellow eyes scanned my face for a chink in the imperial wall of sternness I had erected.  Seeing none, she padded with solemn deliberation down the steps in her bare feet, holding the container of powdered milk as though it were an unwanted burden.
Relocking the door, I watched as she disappeared into the shadows of the modest little blockhouse that was their home.
* * * * *
Jeffrey Lyon turned out to be a “take no prisoners” Headmaster.  Josh and I soon began to realize how laissez-faire Clifford’s reign as Headmaster had been.  Lyon didn’t even pretend to be ingratiating, forever prying into how we managed our classes and what we taught, how it prepared the students for the upcoming exams, how much homework we assigned.  Unlike Clifford, he frequently walked into the classroom unannounced, observed the proceedings for ten minutes or so, then slipped out.  He wanted to see our “lesson plans” each week.  Lesson plans?  What the hell was that?  Tediously, he outlined, in full pedagogical dress, the necessity of “mapping” each week’s “teaching journey.”
Easter break lay not too far ahead.  Headmaster Lyon’s prying ways had helped blot out the guilt I had felt at Clifford’s departure.  But as further penance for that nagging guilt, I began a special tutoring session after school for third form students who wanted to test in science.
Yet in unguarded moments my brain ran amok, ransacking one scenario after another, longing to discover a place, an opportunity when Kadiatu and I could spend three or so uninterrupted days of the coming break making love.  Desperate, I even gave serious consideration to the leper colony at Masanga.  On my visit there during the rainy season, Dr. Keanes had offered to show me more of the surrounding countryside, even promising a dugout canoe excursion on the Sanden River.  Or, if I preferred, I could stay in a small vacant bungalow on the premises where I could read and relax in blissful solitude.  I could follow him on his rounds if I so desired, or explore the surroundings on my own initiative.  Because of my distress during that first visit at seeing the horror of leprosy firsthand, I had never given his offer serious consideration.  But now as I lay awake at night, the stifling heat foiling my attempts to fall asleep, I began to conjure images of how Kadiatu might be smuggled onto the Masanga compound in the back of the Jeep or Renault.   Each carefully plotted subterfuge, however, unraveled in eventual discovery; still it beat counting sheep to while away the tedium of waiting for the sandman’s visit.  
What madness!  I became convinced not only of the hopelessness of such a plan, but increasingly troubled by the brazen effrontery of its motives.  My yearning for Kadiatu’s nubile body had preempted the precious gift of trust from the doctor, the one person I had discovered in all of Sierra Leone most worthy of respect and admiration.  Why, I wondered, did fellow expatriates bestow this trust on me so readily?  And why was I so eager to betray it?
I decided to share my dilemma with Nolan.  Perhaps he knew of someone who might be away during the break, willing to let me use their pad in Freetown.  Josh had already left for Freetown—his weekly pilgrimage to Michelle’s place—by the time I arrived at this decision.  So, amply provisioned with answers to questions about why I happened to be cruising around in a little red Renault, I left for Freetown.  
A young lady at Nolan’s school, a tall, willowy African Kadiatu’s age,  had caught his eye, or he hers as he wanted to believe—even he wasn’t quite sure but the vibrations, he averred, were real.  He and I hadn’t seen that much of one another in the past weeks, and so he pumped me for details about the progress of my affair with Kadiatu.  What kind of small talk or schmoozing or pickup line did one use to break the ice with a young African woman, particularly a student?  How did one get to first base . . . second . . . and so on?  He envied the fact that I had “gone all the way.”  What was it like?  Were they tender, passionate, or dispassionate as rumor had it?  Was it really possible to actually love a black woman, to ignore the genetic, not to mention the cultural, differences between us and them?  What in God’s name did Kadiatu and I talk about?
I couldn’t help but enjoy his envy of my biracial affair, but not wanting to betray the fact that it wasn’t I who had instigated the affair with Kadiatu, I counseled caution.  The pitfalls were legion, the consequences possibly irreparable—hypocrite heal thyself, I thought, as I doled out advice from my store of worldly wisdom.  Strangely enough, he didn’t ask about the future of such an affair and, even stranger was the fact I had given so little thought to that myself.  The direction of my actions had shrunk to the compass of “seize the day.”  What a tangled web we weave when first we practice carpe diem!
Yet Nolan, still as accommodating as he had been in giving over Katia to my lustful longing for female companionship, promised he would ask around.  No doubt someone would be vacating their digs for Easter break.





Chapter 26



A few Volunteers in our group had begun a countdown as the second year of our “tour of duty” began to wind down.  Nolan was one of them, sending word via Josh that, as of a particular Saturday, only 96 days, 10 hours and 33 minutes remained until he said farewell to Sierra Leone forever and boarded a plane for Europe.  He had already paid his plane fare, planned to purchase a VW Bug in Germany, tour Europe one last time for a couple of weeks, then ship the car back to the states where he would begin a job search or go back to school.  
My own future seemed to loom distant and less certain.  Despite the fact that some of my best laid plans to be of service to the people of Sierra Leone, especially the students, had in Robert Burns words “gang aft agley,” despite the folly of the personal choices I had made, despite the heat and myriad inconveniences of life in the tropics, the endless days of nothing but oppressive sun and heat, the omnipresent specter of disease, the grinding poverty of those I had been sent to help, the social gulf between us, the ineptitude of their attempts at self-governance, and the bewildering maze of customs and languages—despite all of this, a mysterious connection had formed between myself and Africa, a bond I could not put into words but which was, without question, palpable. I knew my relationship with Kadiatu had much to do with this feeling.  Alone together, especially when we made love, our singular genetic identities paled into insignificance.  In some strange way I had lost not only my sense of alienation to the privations of living in West Africa, but also that marked awareness of my whiteness, so conspicuous during the early months of my first year in Sierra Leone.  In idle moments, I tried to imagine staying beyond our two year term in Sierra Leone.  Could I marry or at least live with Kadiatu?  
But how would that be possible?  Despite the country’s need for teachers, our affair would, no doubt, make me a pariah among candidates for vacant teaching positions.  Though Kadiatu was seventeen and I twenty-three, for all I knew Sierra Leone’s courts might find me guilty of statutory rape regardless of the fact that pregnancy among girls as young as twelve, thirteen, and fourteen was not uncommon.  Even worse, I couldn’t shake off Nolan’s oblique reference to the cultural and education gulf between us.  What would we talk about?  What would she cook me for breakfast or dinner?  Could she even cook?  What did we truly have in common that would make such a union viable?
Oh for a compass—something to point a way out of the looming quandaries.  I envied Josh’s unerring sense of direction.  He had finally popped the question to Michelle; she said yes and they planned a wedding in July, sometime after my supposed departure for the States.  She would move to Waterloo, take over my teaching duties—all except science—and they would assume housekeeping in the leaky, waterless residence by the highway.  She didn’t teach science but Headmaster Lyon—who, unlike Clifford, had already been openly critical of the stock of chemicals and equipment I had ordered—had a background in science and would assume that duty.  My departure had become a fait accompli, the plans for my absence already laid, and I began to grow uneasy in this lame duck status.
As to the “waterless residence,” my prescient warning that the water supply in the pipeline feeding our house might dry up altogether, whether the valve in the adjacent field was closed or open, quickly became reality.  Our investment in the water tank had provided only two months of showers before the dwindling pressure in the line failed to force the water up to our rooftop tank.  Even before that, the water had become increasingly tainted with the rust-red sediment which even after boiling clogged the ceramic candles in the kitchen water filter.
Nonetheless, Josh proved to be as undeterred as he was single-minded, brushing off my suggestion that he simply bathe at Michelle’s place once a week.  No, we would have our showers!  With Alimamy and Santigie’s aid he located a stream that still flowed not more than five miles from the house.  He managed to commandeer a couple of 50 gallon metal drums in Freetown and had them cut down so they could be slid in the back of the Jeep when the tailgate was down.  Thus began another weekly chore: hauling water from this new source, water that called to mind all the warnings in Peace Corps training about bathing or swimming in local streams.  To me the entire enterprise reeked of the folly of mad dogs too long in the tropical sun.  First, we had to set up a bucket brigade at the stream to fill the drums, then again at the house to move the precious water from the back of the Jeep up to the tank.  In the trips to and from the stream, due to the “slosh factor,” a good deal of water ended up in the back of the Jeep no matter how slowly or carefully we drove from the stream back to the house.
Through all of this, another development flitted through my mind each day: Nolan had sent word through Josh that he had found a place where Kadiatu and I could “shack up” during the Easter break.  One of the VSO’s who occupied a bungalow on the Methodist compound had offered the use of a spare bedroom.  Josh said the fellow might be home the first night but planned to be gone for most of the break.  We would have the place to ourselves.

* * * * *
Kadiatu’s appearance at school became more sporadic in the weeks after the Clifford’s departure for England.  Her absence made me anxious—wondering what questions this new development might raise among fellow students and faculty.  But her presence at school caused me even more anxiety.  The fact that she now lived with her mother in Freetown provided a handy rationalization for her erratic attendance, for now she was dependent on the fickle service of buses or lorries to and from Peninsula.  I wondered, but decided not to risk asking, where she got the money for the daily trips.  
Occasionally, she caught a ride at the stop across the road from our house.  On those days I drove her from the school to the house along with Alimamy and Santigie.  I did my best to discourage this since, more often than not, she would follow me into the house.  The anxiety that someone might become suspicious about our relationship, particularly Alimamy and Santigie, had made me hyper-vigilant. How much did the boys already know, and would they gossip about what they knew, or speculated, with fellow students and acquaintances in Waterloo?  Those questions distracted me every hour of each day.  And the students who looked up to me from their desks for instruction each day in the classroom?  What did they know?  Surely I lived in an illusion to think that my secret had traveled no further than Josh and Nolan.
Yet I ached to be with her, to explore those many pathways to that wondrous juncture when she locked her legs about my waist, drawing me deeper inside her.  Her sentient presence in the Jeep or Renault or even the stored images of our love-making only served to stroke that insatiable longing.  So the inevitable happened.  One Friday when Josh had already left for Freetown and the boys had gone to Waterloo after school, the two of us were alone together in the Renault in the brief drive to the house.  In the tumescent silence separating us, I fought unsuccessfully to suppress the desire stirring, then welling within.  
After parking the Renault in front of the garage, I hurriedly climbed the front staircase without speaking.  She followed dutifully, her book satchel swinging in mocking gaiety as she mounted the steps.
Unlocking the front door, I paused, blocking her entry.  “Aren’t you going to catch a ride to Freetown?”
She didn’t answer, that annoying yet alluring pout spreading across her features.  As I walked to the bedroom, she continued to trail after me.  Pretending to be oblivious of her presence, I stripped to my drawers and T-shirt while she leaned against the doorjamb watching with clinical interest.  Without looking in her direction, I raised the netting from the still unmade bed, settling back into its cocoon-like comfort.  Two contrary impulses vied for control in those moments: the first, my swiftly eroding resolve not to be further tempted by the siren call of her closeness—now no more than six feet away; the second, my anguish that inviting her to join me there in bed, in the house in broad daylight, was simply a bridge too far. 
Rolling to my side to face her, I met her eyes directly.  “I’ve found a place in Freetown where we can be together for a couple of days next week.  No one will bother us there; we can make love without fear of being seen.”
Her face brightened, only to be shadowed by what seemed to me contempt for my anxiety about being seen.  Nevertheless she moved toward the bed, stopping no more than a foot away.  Her normally rough knees, exposed below the hem of the gray uniform skirt, had been glossed by oil or some cosmetic.  A shudder of loneliness, born of wanton desire, cascaded to that place so central to our being—that place we wistfully call the heart.
She sat on the edge of the bed while I  moved to give her space.  Partially unbuttoning the blouse of her uniform, I nuzzled the bra-imprisoned breasts, reaching with thirsting fingers beneath her skirt to trace the glabrous flesh of her thighs.  
“Driver, one bell!”  The throaty roar of a decelerating lorry swept into the room as it slowed at the junction of the highway and the road into Waterloo.  Sounds of pounding bare feet rose through the bedroom window on the side of the house, the excited voices of the watchman’s youngest children piercing the air like startled birds as they raced to watch the spectacle across the highway—a lorry from Freetown disgorging its passengers and their wares.  The dissonant voices against the background of the lorry’s idling motor accomplished what my own resolve could not, suspending the opportunity to make love. 
Could the noises from inside the bedroom, I wondered, carry as clearly to the outside world as the noises outside did into the bedroom?  Then I heard a more familiar sound, a door shutting in Alimamy and Santigie’s room beneath the house.  Muffled voices floated up the stairwell from their room into the house just before the lorry pulled away. 
I slipped from the bed and, crouching so as not to be visible from the outside, crept to the bedroom door to lock it.
Kadiatu had rolled over on her back, watching me with a faint suggestion of amusement on her lips at these antics of precaution.  As I started back across the room toward the bed, someone tried the handle of the door.  Startled, I glanced at Kadiatu, raising my index finger to my lips.
A light tapping came from the door.  “Mr. Livingston?” a voice said softly.  
Alimamy!  Paralyzed by the thought of discovery, I held my breath and motioned to Kadiatu once more to keep quiet.  For one guarded, heart-pounding moment—hoping Alimamy would think I was napping—I listened for the sound of retreating bare feet upon the tile floor.  I waited in vain, however.  The noise of a car pulling into the driveway and rolling to a stop in the drive just beneath the front window suddenly eclipsed all other sounds.  The engine had the ticking valve noise of Headmaster Lyon’s Opel.  Hearing the noise, Kadiatu rolled from the bed to peek out the window.
“Mr. Lyon?” I whispered.  She turned back toward me, nodding
My God, what did he want?  I fumbled to get my shorts and sandals on, signaling Kadiatu to keep quiet and out of sight.  “Not on the bed,” I hissed as she moved toward it, motioning for her to button up her blouse and sit at the desk.
“Stephen!”
Christ almighty!  Lyon’s voice already echoed through the empty anteroom.  Like one of his classroom visits, Headmaster Lyon had walked in without being invited.
“Just . . . just a minute,” I called out.
I unlocked the door to the bedroom, gesturing one last time to Kadiatu to be quiet, then relocked it, buttoning up the front of my shorts as I made my way down the hall.
Instead of his hand, Lyon held out a couple of letters to me.  “Brought your mail from the post office.”
Josh had already come to resent Lyon’s presumptive ways, and I was beginning to feel relief that I wouldn’t be spending another school year under this man’s leadership.  We stood there without speaking for a moment while he scanned the living room and adjoining dining room.
“First time I’ve seen the inside of this place.  Mind if I sit?” he asked, taking a chair.  “Sorry to barge in like this, but I’ve been meaning to discuss something with you, and it seems I’m always too busy at school.”
I felt that familiar rush, part dread, part guilt.  Here it comes; he knows about Kadiatu.  No, he’s heard rumors about our involvement.  Now—my God, he had caught us in flagrante delicto!  My nerves, torqued by guilt, short-circuited, leaving me without the power of speech.  
“I’ve received word from the Ministry of Education that the Sierra Leone National football team is sponsoring a tournament for Colony schools.  Malcolm told me about the work you’ve done with building a team at Peninsula.  I’d like to enter our team in the tournament if it’s okay with you.”
The blade of the guillotine still had not fallen; my fears of having to own up to my trespasses and pay the piper for my crimes, remained unfounded.  Momentarily, a surge of relief washed through my nerves.  Then a tableau of Kadiatu reclining on my bed or sitting at my desk in the room on the other side of the living room wall chastened that sense of relief.
I groped clumsily for the right words.  “To tell you the truth, I’ve been hoping someone else might take over the job of coaching the team.  Did Malcolm tell you about the last match we had here?”
“He said the other team seemed undisciplined—something to that effect.”
“More like a near riot.  Feelings seem to run pretty high in Waterloo where football is concerned.  We couldn’t control the spectators at the game.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem in this case.  The tournament is set up so each game will be played at a neutral site and refereed by a member of the national team.  Instead of eleven players on each team, they’ve reduced the number to six—easier to control, I suppose.”  He paused, staring across the room into the dining area.  “Hello there!”
I turned to see Alimamy standing mutely at attention beside the dining table. 
“Afternoon, sir,” he replied submissively.
“What is your name?” the headmaster asked.
“Alimamy, sir.”
“Alimamy?  That’s an interesting name.  I take it, you work for Mr. Livingston?”
“Yes sir.”
“Are you a student at the school?”
“Yes sir.”
Lyon nodded in my direction.  “I’m trying to learn the students’ names, but still not having much success—very bad with names.”
“What do you need, Alimamy?” I asked.
“Please sir, the key to your room.  I am finding the door locked,” he said with a puzzled look.  
Suddenly, my brain became a carousel I couldn’t board.  “What do you want in my bedroom for?”
“The laundry, sir.”
“Oh,” I said, ransacking the clutter in my mind for a way out of this one.  “Tell you what.  Remember my asking you to wash the Renault sometime this week?  Why don’t you do that now?  Leave the laundry until tomorrow.”
The hint of puzzlement remained in his expression for a few fleeting seconds, then vanished in resignation. 
“Yes sir.”
When he had disappeared down the stairs to his room and the sound of the door shutting punctuated his exit, Lyon spoke in a confidential voice.  “Not taking any chances I see.”
I guessed this might be an allusion to the “tiffing” incident Alimamy had been embroiled in—perhaps a parting anecdote or “tip” from Malcolm Clifford, the exiting headmaster, to the new one.
“I trust Alimamy with money, but I don’t care to tempt him with a copy of the science exam I’ve been putting together at my desk.  His grades are such that I don’t want to license a roving eye.” 
What a hideous web of lies!  I felt a rush of embarrassment as I thought of  Kadiatu possibly eavesdropping on the other side of the wall, making note of Mr. Livingston’s self-serving manipulation of the truth.
“Got to go,” Lyon said, jumping to his feet.  “I’d prefer that you stay in your role as coach until you leave in three months; however, I’ll defer to your judgment.  This would probably be the last match the team will play this year.  Let me know in the next couple of days what you decide.”
I walked him to the door watching as he descended the steps, then slunk back into the living room to stand out of sight at the front bank of windows where I could assure myself he, indeed, had departed.  As he opened the car door and started to swing in behind the steering wheel, I saw him pause, balancing on one foot, nearly half-in and half-out of the car.  He was staring in the direction of my bedroom window, his forehead lined by the telltale signs of perplexity.  Finally, as if shaking off a mirage, he settled behind the wheel, looked up at the window one last time, then backed the Opel out of the drive.
My heart was quaking, a potent alchemy of fear and rage dissolving the last remnant of constraint.  She must have somehow exposed herself at the bedroom window!  I charged through the dining room and round the corner to the hallway leading to the bedroom.  She was laying on the bed, a feline smugness on her face as though this could only be the first of her nine lives, whereas I was certain I had witnessed the catastrophic end to the only one I had been granted.
“What the hell . . .  what did you think you were doing?”
A pained expression clouded the smugness.  She merely grunted as she rose in the bed.
“Mr. Lyons saw you in my room!”
“Eh, Bo, i noh de si mi.”
“He did.  I saw him looking up at the window!”
Pouting but sensing my foul mood and anger she spat back in clear English, “I do not care what the man saw.”
I thought I heard a noise coming from the dining room.  I had forgotten Alimamy’s presence in the house . . . or perhaps it was Santigie.  Livingston, you dolt!  I had to stop this secret sharer crap.  I blew across my index finger once again for quiet.  We froze for the space of a couple of minutes, but heard nothing more.
“You have to leave,” I whispered.
She shook her head.
“Yes!” I hissed.  
“I have no money for a ride.”
I dug my hand into my shorts and laid four shillings on the bed beside her.
“I’m going down to the boys’ room to see what Alimamy and Santigie are up to.  Please take the money and go.  I will pick you up at the Cotton Tree next Wednesday at 5 p.m.”
Her skirt had been pushed up above her thighs and her breast, that cornucopia of earthly delight, heaved up and down with each deliberate breath.  For a moment I felt like a man wandering the desert whose eyes have betrayed him with a mirage of what he desires most.  How long, Lord, I pleaded, must I thirst?
There was no one in the house.  I descended the steps to the boys’ room readying myself with reasons why the door to my bedroom had been locked.  Their door was ajar, but no one was in the room.  I went outside; the Renault sat untouched and dust-covered where I had parked it.  How stupid of me!  Alimamy knew, and I knew, water was much too precious to waste on washing a car.  Was this why he had disregarded my instructions to wash the car?  But that was not like him—ignore what I had instructed him to do.
I walked back through the boys’ quarters up the stairs to the dining room and down the hallway to my bedroom expecting an argument with Kadiatu about why she must leave.  But, here again, I found an empty room.  Like the spectral wench Malcolm had believed she was, Kadiatu had vanished without a sound.  I looked out the same window where I believed Headmaster Lyon might have spied her.  There, across the highway at the intersection, standing—satchel in hand—alone in her brown study, stood Kadiatu, her eyes fixed down the highway toward the vignette’s vanishing point somewhere in the direction of the school.

* * * * *
It wasn’t too difficult to pack the six members of our newly abbreviated football team and myself in the Jeep and head for Freetown for the Colony football tournament.  All of Peninsula’s players had shoes and socks in Peninsula colors, but were still clad in the personal assortment of jerseys and shorts chosen by each player.  The mood among the players was one of high excitement.  The six man configuration had chosen a new captain, Alie Sesay, a shorter than average, slightly built boy from the third form who had never even been considered for the team before, but whose ball handling skills had miraculously improved over the past year.  Alie’s English and Krio sentences were delivered in rapid-fire bursts which I frequently had to ask him to repeat.
My own mood failed to match that of the players, and as we neared Freetown I became increasing anxious about the abilities of our unimposing team.  The outcome of our last match had taken the air out of my enthusiasm for coaching football.  These misgivings had been compounded by the fact that I had received unsettling news from Headmaster Lyon a week earlier: our competition in the match would be Bishop Johnson.  I couldn’t fathom how, of all the schools in Freetown, fickle fate had chosen our arch enemy.  I tried to persuade Lyon that another rematch with Bishop Johnson was ill-advised.  Rather condescendingly, he chided my concern as exaggerated, reminding me that the match would be played on a neutral field and refereed by a member of the national team.  He seemed to think the invitation to join the tournament might be a feather in Peninsula’s cap, win or lose.  Turning down the invite would be bad form.  Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this rematch would not have an agreeable ending.
As it turned out, the field chosen for the match was just across the street from the Methodist compound where Nolan lived.  Play began immediately, for we arrived late and so had no time to warm up.  Truth be told, we hadn’t practiced much for the match and hadn’t devised any offensive or defensive strategies for the six man configuration.
Bishop Johnson’s players seemed equally confused at the beginning of play, but in a very short time had built a two point lead.  Thankfully, their goalie in the previous match was not among the players selected for this team.  Mr. During patrolled the sidelines like an overwrought Pop Warner parent, yelling a barrage of instructions at his players.
When their team scored yet another goal, I became bored with the whole charade.  Whoever had dreamed up the six-man idea was evidently more interested in scouting prospects for the national team than in creating meaningful football matches.  Then I did the unconscionable; I decided to walk across the street to see if Nolan was home rather than watch yet another humiliation of Peninsula’s team.
As I crossed the street to the Methodist compound, the memory of the nearly three days Kadiatu and I had spent making love during the Easter break flooded my mind.  I doubted, given the circumstances of our previous parting, that she would be waiting at the Cotton Tree at the appointed time for this new stage in our intimacy.  But I spotted her immediately, attired in colorful native lappa, her head covered with a bandana cut from the same bright cloth, the small brown suitcase beside her on the sidewalk.  A dainty purse dangled from a fragile brass chain on her right arm.  She looked ready to pay a visit to some rich relative.  I felt the eyes of several people upon us as I threw the suitcase in the back seat of the Renault.  The curiosity of one young man, in particular, annoyed me and I returned his intimidating stare.
Mike, the VSO who lived alone in the dwelling, met us and gave me a key.  He seemed amiable enough, though his sardonic asides about Kadiatu when she was not in earshot indicated he perceived her as my whore rather than a student who had become a lover.  When he left after cooking himself dinner that evening, Kadiatu and I had the place to ourselves and made the most of it.  We showered together before making love.  In the full light of day, I had never seen any woman’s completely nude body in the flesh, and here before my eyes, even if it was only the incandescent light of the bathroom, was the shimmering form that had made Adam break God’s commandment and inspired Botticelli to paint Venus Rising from the Sea.  
But different strokes for different folks, as they say.  When Mike reappeared the following day he happened to catch a glimpse of Kadiatu’s naked form and dropped a tasteless remark about her breasts and Newton’s law of gravity.  I don’t think he could see anything but her blackness.
Images of those days during the Easter break pursued me as I entered the Methodist compound, all thoughts of the football match now upstaged by the uninterrupted love making of that first night and the following day.  We ate no supper the first night, then rummaged the refrigerator and food locker for something to eat late the following morning.  Kadiatu ate only a banana; cold cereal or muffins had absolutely no appeal to her.  I became acutely aware for the first time of the gulf between us in so simple a thing as what we ate.  Yet, undeterred by hunger or exhaustion, we returned to cloy our appetites, sampling the many courses of desire.
During the brief lulls of our sex, exhausted, sated, bits and pieces of murmured trivia crossed between us. 
“Whatin dis?” I asked, tracing the full outline of one of her miraculous breasts.
“Dis,” she said, pointing like a pedagogue at the object of my fascination, “na mi bohbi.”
“And dis,” I said, dipping the tip of my finger into her belly button.
“Na behleh bohtin.”
“And dis,” I asked as I lightly touched the entrance to her vagina.
“Bombo,” she said, covering her mouth to stifle a giggle.
And so began my first lesson in Krio of love’s anatomy.

As I climbed the steps to the porch at Nolan’s place, the ending fiasco to those three days still made me shudder, images inscribed in bold relief that refused to release their claim on my attention.
The morning of the third day, a small group of urchins made a noisy appearance at Mike’s back door, chattering and laughing, carefree, swinging and hanging like reckless gymnasts from the railings of the 2nd floor-level stoop at the back door.  Kadiatu and I had been sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast.  Starting to bite off a piece of banana, she gave a muted cry as two young girls pressed their faces to the door’s glass panels, pointing at her and twisting the handle of the locked door.  The contentment on her face when she had awakened that morning was now twisted with apprehension.  Her chair clattered to the floor as she jumped up from the table, fleeing from their line of sight to the living room.  
Concerned, I got up from the table to investigate.  “What’s the matter?” 
“My mother’s house is close.  I told her I am staying at a friend’s house.  Those pikins will be telling her I am here . . . with you.” 
I couldn’t believe it.  Even in those days, Freetown was no small village, but a congested, sprawling metropolis populated by hundreds of thousands.
“Why didn’t you tell me you lived near here?” I said in exasperation.  “Christ, I drove all the way to pick you up at the Cotton Tree only to bring you here to your own neighborhood?”
“I wanted to make the love with you.”  Her face revealed her raw fear as my own head filled with ominous scenarios.  Might some of these kids go tell her mother as Kadiatu feared?  And what repercussions might that bring?  More spectators?  A visit from an enraged African mother or some upset young vigilantes—like the ones Ms. Cummings-John had riled up in Waterloo?  Time to kiss one more romantic interlude goodbye.  
Somehow I had to get rid of the kids at the kitchen door and sneak Kadiatu off the compound in broad daylight.  I returned to the kitchen door and began yelling angrily at the kids to leave.  But they only laughed and began taunting me; evidently they had played a similar game before with Mike.  I needed a weapon to drive them off, to let them know dis wait man meant business.  A hiking stick hung from a leather thong by the back door.  Grabbing it and unlocking the door, I took a wild swipe at a couple of grinning faces.  A little girl sprang up from a crouching position at the very moment the stick sliced through the air and it caught her alongside the head.  She screamed, cowering, crying, while the others, in headlong flight, scrambled down the staircase.  I had no intention to actually hit any of them, but that didn’t make much difference now.  Suddenly, the little girl sprang toward the steps taking them two at a time.  My heart was pumping wildly as I backed into the kitchen and relocked the door.
“What are you doing here?”
Nolan’s voice plucked me from this trance, the vision of that morning.  I had been standing next to the railing of his porch, staring blankly over the carefully manicured compound at the stoop of the bungalow where the events of that regrettable morning had unfolded.
“I brought our football team to play Bishop Johnson on the field across the street.”
“Want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Nolan yelled from the other room.  “Who the hell is Bishop Johnson?”
“It’s a Catholic secondary school over on the eastside, near Kissy.
“I hear the kids on the eastside are pretty tough.”
“Tell me about it.”
Nolan came back out on the porch and handed me a Heinekens.  “So fill me in on your love fest over at Mike’s place.  He couldn’t tell me much . . . said you and your love child left without saying goodbye.”
“Lighten up, will you?  It was another chapter in the never-ending saga of Livingston disasters.”
“What happened?  Spare not the details, my good lad.”
“Forget you.  I was just reliving them from your porch.  It all started out great; then some kids came around and recognized her.  She . . . we were afraid they would go tell her mom.  It all went to hell after that.” 
“Jesus, Livingston.  You are one singular disaster.”
“In spades.”
“Bad pun.”
We sat there nursing our beers.  “My God, I almost forgot!”  I downed the rest of my bottle in one gulp.  “I’ve got to get back to the football game before it ends.”
Nolan called after me as I took the steps two at a time.  “Drink and run, huh?  Remember, I’m the one who set you up so you and your love-child could have your little orgy.  You owe me a spicy narrative . . . and a beer!”
I jogged across the compound fearing the game might already have ended, the kids left wondering how they would get back to Waterloo.  Old Silver remained where I had parked it, so they would know I hadn’t wandered off far.  Still, my absence was clearly a betrayal: I hadn’t enough interest in their game to hang around, abandoning them to their fate, no matter what the outcome.  When I reached the street, however, I could see play was still in progress.  Hopefully, the boys, caught up in the game, hadn’t noticed my absence from the sidelines.  I asked an intent spectator for the score: six to nothing.  Our Freetown foes had the game well in hand.  
Bishop Johnson punctuated the end of the match with one more goal—lucky seven.  Watching our players hang their heads, Emily Dickinson’s ironic paean to defeat goose-stepped through my head: “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.”  Oh well, perhaps Lyon’s next Games Master would have better luck.  The referee from the national team, James Koroma, came over and congratulated me, for what I wasn’t quite sure.  Not quite the fulsome praise Mr. During had delivered after our first match with Bishop Johnson, but then the motive for Koroma’s undeserved praise became clear; he needed a ride home.
As we walked toward the Jeep, Alie suddenly cried out.  “Mr. Livingston, these boys are throwing stones.”
My heart lurched to freefall.  Surely not—we were in the company of a member of Sierra Leone’s national team!  But as I turned to look I saw their team and some of their fans following us, Mr. During in the lead.  I didn’t like the look on their faces.  
A small rock hit Mr. Koroma in the back and he turned in surprise to search out the culprit in the crowd behind us, yelling at During.  “Why are these boys throwing stones?  Is this the way to behave after victory?”
  During separated himself from the crowd following us, huffing with apologies to Koroma.  “I have been telling the boys to put down the stones.  We want no trouble, but you see they remember how they were treated when we played our last match in Waterloo—the Headmaster at Peninsula choking our goalie . . . their players throwing stones at our lorry as we left.”
Korma turned to me for conformation or denial.  On the spur of the moment, I didn’t know how to respond to During’s warped summary of what had happened.  An image of his fear as I had slammed him up against the wall of the science lab popped into my head.
“There was a misunderstanding at the game,” I said, weakly.
We had reached the Jeep and a stone pinged off the back of it.  The crowd behind During grew more raucous as more stones rained on the Jeep.
“These boys are behaving very badly,” Mr. Koroma said to me, but the indignation had left his voice. 
I heard an unsuppressed sob from Alie.  The poor kid looked like he was about to wet his shorts.  Opening the door to the Jeep on the passenger side, I urged them to get inside quickly, thinking we had best get the hell out of there.  I motioned for Koroma to take the passenger seat in the front.  Another stone hit the windshield on the passenger side so hard I thought the glass would surely crack.  My knees turned to jelly at that point, the little bravado that I had tried to maintain for the sake of the kids swiftly leaking away as I scanned the faces surrounding the Jeep, their eyes shining with the pleasure of our predicament.  I remembered the attack at Lumley Beach where Kadiatu and I had gone to neck—the undisguised savagery in the laughter of the anonymous young man who pounded on the driver’s-side window so hard I thought it would break.
I tried to be deliberate as I marched around the Jeep to climb in the driver’s seat.  Another small piece of gravel bounced off the hood.  Warning everyone to close their windows I started the motor, revved the engine and popped the clutch, hoping to rain a little gravel and dirt on During and his crowd of followers.  A brief hailstorm of stones pinged on the Jeep’s body as we bounced across the end of the field in a cloud of dust.  As soon as we hit the tarmac of the street, I floored the accelerator.  Alie was crying now and Mr. Koroma kept repeating, “I can’t believe what I have been seeing.”
Bastards!  I was livid with rage.  Had it not been for the presence of Koroma in the seat alongside me, I might have taken a run at During and his hooligans as I had at the young men on Lumley Beach.  How could I ever have entertained the thought of staying in Sierra Leone with Kadiatu among these savages?
After we deposited Mr. Koroma at his home in Wellington, the boys began to open up a bit, recounting the afternoon’s adventure with false bravado, all the while teasing Alie because he hadn’t been able to hide his fear.  When I told them of my own fear they became quieter.  Thinking of what had happened when Bishop Johnson visited Waterloo, I began to wonder whether—despite the camaraderie I believe we shared at that moment—these same young men wouldn’t, in the heat of some unforeseen moment, revert to a similar primitivism.  As seems to be the case with so many humans, I never questioned how others might read some of my own actions since I had been in Sierra Leone.
After what we had been through, I felt compelled to take each of the boys to wherever they were living rather simply drop them off at the school compound.  As we passed our house on the highway, I noticed Josh standing at the top of the front steps watching a procession of people filing up our drive and alongside the house to the back where the night watchman and his family lived.  I honked the horn, but Josh didn’t wave.  My impulse was to turn around and find out what was going on, but I decided whatever it was could wait until I had finished delivering the boys to their homes.




Chapter 27



A stark, sinister statistic bedevils my memories of Sierra Leone.  I have always thought I heard it from one of the “experts” during our training in New Paltz, New York.  Given that authority, I know I repeated it several times to others when I returned home as I narrated stories of my two-year adventure in West Africa to my family and acquaintances and in talks before other audiences.  Those were the early halcyon years of the Peace Corps when Americans, especially churches and schools, hungered for firsthand information about our experiences.  Hoping memory serves me correctly, I repeat that statistic here: 75% of children who lived in the eastern-most provinces of Sierra Leone died before reaching the age of five.  
That’s three of every four children dying before they were old enough to enter school.  Somehow, the kids that I taught at Peninsula, most from upcountry, had narrowly missed the grim reaper’s blade.  Not only that, but they had been winners in another statistical lottery by making it as far as secondary school in their education.  How sobering each quantum leap in the progression of their beleaguered lives!
I know, as the cynical adage goes, that figures don’t lie but liars figure, and a person my age is apt to misquote a statistic that is more than half a century old.  The number may sound inflated to those not acquainted with the realities of life in the tropics, but given the remoteness of Sierra Leone’s eastern provinces, the conditions of poverty and malnutrition that existed, the diseases that ravaged the population, and the absence of all but the most primitive health care, that figure has all the earmarks of fact.   
By the time I returned to our house after delivering the boys to the various places they lived, I was exhausted, my nerves taut as piano wires from the stoning incident.  As I climbed down from the Jeep, I heard an unearthly noise coming from the back of the house—a chorus of shrieking wails tuned to the same overwrought pitch as my nerves.  Josh held the front door open for me as I mounted the steps.  His expression could only be described as glum.
“Who are all the people out back and what the hell is that noise?”
“Relatives and friends of the watchman’s family.  They’re having some kind of wake.  The kid died.”
“What?  What kid?”
“The watchman’s infant son.”
“My God, how?”
Josh looked at me curiously for a moment, searching my face for the telltale sign that surely I must know the answer to that question. “A fellow from the clinic across the highway came over to examine the body.  The baby was undernourished—basically, it starved to death.”
Josh’s words struck swift, hard, like a sucker punch to the solar plexus.  I collapsed into a chair at the dining room table.  It couldn’t be—it just could not be.  A message flashed with all its caustic import across the wiring of my brain: “Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?”    
A clinic just across the highway, Peace Corps Volunteers close by, yet an unlikely probability had claimed this infant male—as if he had been raised in some remote village of the eastern provinces.  Dead of malnutrition, in our back yard—starving to death minute by agonizing minute.  It was a testament to the prodigious capacity of the “have’s” of the world to bury their heads in the sand, to ignore the misery and plight of the “have not’s.” I had lived alongside a family whose living circumstances, if I had had the curiosity to examine them more closely, would be considered unfit for humankind.  But absorbed in my personal melodrama with Kadiatu, I had spent most of my time and energy trying to dodge the consequences of my decision to live by the mantra of “seize the day.”  
I staggered toward my bedroom, stopping at the bathroom, desperate to purge the lump of guilt burning inside.  But nothing would come.  Thus began the slow metastasis of another’s death in the metaphysic of my personal being. 
* * * * *
I visited the clinic across the highway the following day, anxious for any shred of evidence concerning the infant’s death, however insignificant, that might condone my behavior or provide some kind of absolution.  The clinician who had spoken to Josh, a very obliging middle-aged African, listened attentively to my halting confession, the vile narrative of powdered milk episodes.  
“You cannot take the blame upon yourself.  This is West Africa.  They call it the ‘white man’s grave’ but it is, more accurately, the grave of the black man.  The woman could have brought the baby here, but she, or perhaps her husband, chose not to do so.  I have heard he is a very proud man.”
“But I should have given them the milk.  It was the least I could have done.”
“But you yourself said it was money she begged for, not milk—money that might have been used to feed the habit of her drinking.  Even if you gave the milk to her husband, his pride most likely would have prevented him from accepting it.”
I suppose what I sought was some act of penance—to suffer in some negotiable degree for this sin of neglect, but my secular confidant stopped short of prescribing any.  So I returned to the house to exorcise that tumor of guilt with the absolving power of alcohol.  For two days I lived a dark, murky half-life while Josh kept Headmaster Lyon at bay with the white lie that I had taken sick.
The watchman appeared to take this death harder than I could have imagined.  He sequestered himself for days in the dark confinement of their dwelling.  When I finally got up the nerve to visit that cheerless cellblock, he sat rigidly mute in the half light, his normal “Mornin’ masa” replaced by a phantom flicker of acknowledgement.  I suppose I assumed that infant mortality being what it was in Sierra Leone, surely this stoic fireplug of a man would accept another death with equanimity.  Given his temperament and reputation, and the almost hermit-like lifestyle of the family, I confess I was amazed at the number of people who had filed up to pay their respects.  For days after the wake’s end, those piercing wails of the women drilled away at that cavity of the human psyche we call conscience, their pain penetrating to the roots of my alcohol-infused stupor.  Somehow John Donne’s “Devotion” on death—that anyone’s death diminishes all of us, and the bell tolling for the death of another tolls for each of the living—had tapped into a mythos that informed the rituals of living on a continent as distant as Africa.  
Then there was Fudia, who seemed considerably less moved by the death of her baby brother, quickly returning to her annoying ways shortly after the wake.  My main concern was for her mother, the wan, despondent figure who, like her husband, seldom appeared outside the confines of the cramped block building.  I hoped that she would not continue to find succor in the bottle, but, given her circumstances and my own insecurities, I failed to see how I could be of comfort.
* * * * *
One Saturday morning, a couple of weeks later, I lay awake in the predawn light, staring up at a damp spot in the ceiling through the mosquito netting.  I had slept fitfully.  During the night the first storm signaling the rainy season’s return—more wind than rain—had swept through Waterloo, leaving a pleasant though barely perceptible chill in its wake.  
The sound of the day’s first lorry braking at the other side of the highway and the noise of human discord that always accompanied these stops floated through the windows I had reopened after the storm passed.  With customary impatience, the lorry driver revved the engine, honked the horn, then teased the overburdened vehicle through its succession of gears, leaving the intersection once more empty of human sounds.  I groped my way out from under the mosquito netting and sat on the edge of the bed, fighting the inertia of insufficient sleep, wishing I had a cigarette or at least the warm comfort of the day’s first cup of joe in my hands to focus my scattered thoughts.
In Waterloo a couple of cocks crowed tardily to announce the coming of dawn.  A solitary dog, a statistical anomaly like my students for having escaped the “chop” pot or the Bar-B-Q spit, barked incessantly.  Muffled sounds of Waterloo’s reawakening reached my ears like the ticking grumble of a teakettle about to boil.  The uneven tarmac of the drive had been darkened by the rain, which had puddled in spots, the air rinsed to a clarity I hadn’t seen since the beginning of the Harmattan.  A short file of women wound up the trail toward the forested hillside to forage for firewood, their laughter and babbling voices blessing like matins the crisp morning air.  This was Africa’s psalm, the centuries’ old renewal of daily life, rituals so starkly new and alien to me only two years earlier which had now soaked unwittingly into the rhythms of my own living.  
With Josh in Freetown as usual, I did my best to measure out enough coffee for a single cup in the percolator, waited impatiently for it to boil, then carried the mug upstairs to the roof to witness this purified morning outside the restrictive confines of the house.  Unaware of my presence on the roof, Alimamy knelt over a small puddle on the tarmac.  He had pulled an all-nighter studying for the upcoming West African Exams and rubbed vigorously with a dab of toothpaste on his index finger at the kola nut stains on his lips and teeth.  Wanting to keep this time private, I backed away from the balustrade surrounding the roof and moved quietly toward the back.  As my eyes ran up the hillside toward the D.C.’s residence where Headmaster Lyon and his family now lived, I discovered the mansion wasn’t visible from our rooftop, contradicting the dream I had earlier of its monastic presence at the crest of the hill.  
I sipped the coffee slowly, mentally chastising my lack of initiative over the past two years.  I knew in that moment I should have spent more mornings witnessing, as I did now, the pristine wonder of Africa: the precious minutes of earth’s transformation which seemed to absolve—if only for a fleeting moment—both the blighted circumstances of the millions of impoverished lives populating this continent and the seemingly foolish errand I had undertaken to improve those circumstances.  I pictured for a moment my life at age nine, the time when I had first promised God I would someday be a missionary.  I had begun memorizing passages from the Bible to prepare myself for this vocation, the Beatitudes being one of my first Herculean tests.  One hopeful verse came repeatedly to mind as I tried, there in St. Louis, to imagine the circumstances of life in a place like Africa: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”  Later, growing up under the shadow of Armageddon as nuclear weapons began to proliferate in the 1950’s, I cynically amended that prophecy: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth—or what’s left of it after the not-so-meek have laid waste its bounty.”
No signs of life came from the humble outbuilding where the watchman and his family lived.  I wondered if they would continue to stay on, or if the tragedy of the infant’s death would drive them away to a place where the burden of memory might weigh less heavily.  But perhaps this catastrophe did not anchor their consciousness as it did mine, and the wake, the shrieking wails of the women and all the other obsequies attending the infant’s death had served to purge the visionary images that had proclaimed the potential of this new life.
Looking down from this vantage point upon the roof seemed a symbol of my relationship to Africa.  Despite my two years in Sierra Leone, despite the romance of those feelings I had absorbed in each wayward heartbeat of this existence, I knew I was still a foreigner, a stranger elevated by the accident of birth in a distant culture, one who could feel compassion, or sympathy, or lust, or contempt for these primitive remnants of our mutual ancestry, but never the égalité of beings on a level playing field.  For one fleeting moment, I felt as if I were looking down on myself, on my place in the universe, my flight from the culture that originally nourished me, my tenuous and fraudulent mission to Africa, my first consensual intimacy with another being—all this spiraling into the drift and darkness of a soulless universe.
* * * * *
When I first arrived in 1962, the Colony Mountains of Sierra Leone and the beautiful natural harbor they gave birth to were, it seemed to me, one of earth’s most beautiful places.  Even the dry season could not diminish that impression, and when the rains came, it seemed I had been delivered to Eden: the rain-soaked lushness, the emerald green of both the abutting sea and flora, the year-round temperate weather, never rising above the 90’s and never below the 70’s, the fruits of mother earth readily at hand—mangoes, bananas, coconuts, pineapples, papaya, oranges, plantain, the bouncing naked breasts of women as they pounded their laundry on the rocks of a stream—so rank in contrast to the Spartan Calvinist summers and winters of my youth.  And yet, as Ron Carlson wrote, “To see something is only to establish the first terms of your misunderstanding.”
In the fifty years since I first set foot on the soil of Sierra Leone, so much has passed that I find impossible to get my mind around.  The most devastating change of all, the civil war that ripped away the last vestiges of hope: a hope that civility might somehow triumph over the avaricious hunger of human kind for the fleeting bling of power and riches.  Tragically, Sierra Leone’s diamond industry was fated to become an international symbol of those appetites.  
I have visited Sierra Leone several times through the miracle of satellite images, searching for familiar landmarks, roads I traveled, the haunts that became the backdrop of my two years there.  Peninsula Secondary School still stands, somehow surviving the ravages of the war and growing to serve the community’s growth.  But so much of the landscape has been altered by the flight of upcountry citizens during the war years to the relative safety they imagined the Colony villages might afford.  The village of Waterloo has enlarged beyond recognition, the mountain forests I hiked behind the D.C.’s residence stripped of their foliage to sustain that migration, fleeing the rampant savagery and genocide that has plagued nearly all of Africa.  And I wonder as I study these images what “misunderstanding” is forming in my mind about the Sierra Leone I once knew and the Sierra Leone I now view through the miracle of virtual reality.
My first impression of Sierra Leone as one of earth’s Eden’s was shattered at the age of twenty-three by the death of the watchman’s infant son.  As Donne wrote, we are not islands; we are all parts of the continent of mankind.  I shirked a responsibility, looking the other way as humans are wont to do—especially many of us raised in the bubble of American vanity—and the senseless death diminished me as surely as if I had taken a machete and hacked off the limbs of my own innocence.
* * * * *
One day during those last two months of school, Kadiatu mysteriously appeared after school at our front door.  She hadn’t been to school for several days and after being evasive for several minutes, indicated she wanted to talk privately, but wouldn’t open up as I tried to pry from her “About what?”  
Prodded by my paranoia, I suggested we meet in the woods in half an hour by the small, newly constructed dam on the stream that ran alongside the drive to Orville’s bungalow.  So she left, and as I watched her climb the hill, a faint intuition registered at the back of my mind—the schoolgirl bounce in her step was gone.  Thirty minutes later I carefully set off by a different route, making sure the boys had not witnessed my departure.
She was waiting at the dam, impatient but, nonetheless, still playing the annoying game of refusing to speak.  I was in no mood to pry speech from her, so I pulled the pack of Camels from my shirt pocket and lit one, waiting for the spirit to move her.  She, in her turn, continued to stare fixedly at her feet, stirring the water in a small pool with her toes.  By now the reader of this biography will have guessed what was troubling her.  Call me naive, innocent, oblivious, or stupid beyond imagining—perhaps stewing in a mix of all the above—but at that particular moment in time I hadn’t a clue.
As always seemed the case in moments when some anonymous tension existed between us, she at last spoke in a barely audible voice.
“Speak up.  I can’t hear you when you mumble.  Either tell me what’s on your mind or I’m leaving.  You’re wasting my time.”  The words and the coldness with which they were delivered didn’t fail to register in her face.
She glared at me crossly, but there was distress in her voice.  “I am not having my period.”
The words rolled through the silence of the forest like the thunder of a cresting wave.  The surrounding foliage pressed in till I couldn’t get my breath.  Naïve as I was, I needed no one to decode the significance of this message.  Frightened, angry, my world, my future toppling like trees in the path of progress’s bulldozer, I sternly cross-examined her.  
“Are you sure?  Girls sometimes miss their periods.  How long has it been since your last one?”
Her eyes were steeled with resentment. What did she expect?  Like so many young men caught in this moment, I wanted to flee from any responsibility for her predicament.
“Two months.”
I struggled to keep my composure, to parry the dull edge of fear from wounding my voice.  But all the warmth I had ever felt for this young woman was suddenly plunged into a chilling brine of regret.  I felt trapped, exploited, obligated by the urge to console, but manacled by images of a fragmented future.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
She shook her head violently.  “There is no money for a doctor.  If my mother finds out she will throw me into the street.”
At age twenty-three I was confused by what I perceived as the hypocrisy of West African morality: sex buzzed in the air like the sensual thrum of insects in the languid, torpid air of the tropics.  To me it seemed the singular ecstasy of what we called “making love” was, in these lives of marginal subsistence, a way of keeping one’s tenuous balance along the precipice of hopelessness.  But the penalty for unwanted pregnancy was harsh—ostracism—as the examples of Juliette and Kadiatu had shown.  Later in life I would come to recognize that fundamentally Africa’s moral codes, like most moralities, were grounded in pragmatism.  A woman who carries with her the liability of pregnancy and no visible means of support is a woman shunned.
“We’ll go see the Peace Corps doctor.”  The gesture was calculating, peremptory, not humanitarian.  It arose from no special concern about her health, or the viability of the fetus.  As much as I hated to reveal my foolish choices to the Peace Corps administration, I needed assurances in order to plot the dwindling alternatives that lay ahead.  First things first.  Was she really pregnant?
My resolve softened a bit as I watched her pick at the lichens on the rock where she sat.  I dimly recognized this step would leverage her into an ordeal as intimidating to her as it was for me, perhaps more so.  But the possibility that she was pregnant had been sprung suddenly upon me on the heels of my agony over the death of the watchman’s son.  Now her willful diffidence pushed all the wrong buttons.  I got up, flicked the cigarette butt in the water and turned to go.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“What?”
“I say, I will go.”
* * * * *
I drove directly to PC headquarters in Freetown the next day.  Luckily, Roger Crandall, the doctor, was in his office, and with calculated reluctance I recounted my predicament.  Neither shocked nor surprised, he responded as a fraternity brother might with a jest about the difficulty of keeping one’s peter in one’s pants in West Africa.  He agreed to examine Kadiatu, but only on the condition that I tell my story to McClellan, the PC Rep.  Try as I might, I couldn’t talk him out of this condition.  He remained adamant: what I had done had potentially damaging repercussions.  As our lead representative in Sierra Leone, McClellan had every right to be informed so he could be prepared to take appropriate action, whether it meant moving me from Peninsula Secondary to another school in the country or possibly sending me back to the States.
The seriousness of what I had become entangled in began to dawn upon me.  This was no longer a simple romance involving only the principals, a young African student and her Peace Corps lover.  It had, like the proverbial pebble dropped upon the glassy surface of a pond, a ripple effect that touched countless lives.  Might it even jeopardize the PC mission in Sierra Leone?
The day of the exam came all too swiftly, a day both Kadiatu and I dreaded.  Watching her as we mounted the steps to the doctor’s office, I sensed her terror of this ordeal.  I tried not to look in her direction as we sat in the waiting area, but couldn’t help noticing the nervous rhythm of her short legs rocking back and forth beneath the chair she sat on.
  Crandall finally opened the door to the inner office, bidding goodbye to a Volunteer from Josh’s group whom I only vaguely recognized.  I thanked the gods for this small blessing.  I had dreaded the possibility of meeting someone I knew well and hearing “Stephen, what are you in for?”
The doctor retreated from his customary jocular mood when he saw the fear in Kadiatu’s eyes.  After a brief interview with the two of us, during which Kadiatu remained shyly silent, he dismissed me from the examining room.  For the next twenty minutes, I sat alone with my dread in the empty waiting room, staring at the closed door to his office, its stony blankness rebuking the temerity of the reckless choices I had made since coming to West Africa.  For the first time in my life, my destiny, it seemed, had been yanked from my hands, given over to a bureaucracy of a magnitude I could not imagine.  Would it be lenient or harsh, as I surely deserved, in meting out judgment?
The door opened suddenly.  Crandall strode across the room to where I was sitting, an ingratiating smile on his face, while Kadiatu hung back in the shadows of the examining room.
“Well there’s something growing in there, and it ain’t a tapeworm.”
He seemed to be enjoying this, and I wanted badly to wipe the tepid grin from his face.
“Bulletin!  You’re not her first.  She’s been sexually active since before Christmas.”
Nothing he could have said would have stunned me more.  “How do you know that?”
“She told me.”
I felt my face flush—the news stung like a slap.  Could it be that I was not her only lover?  I shook my head in disbelief, then looked over at Kadiatu, who turned away.  
“I’m pretty sure it’s yours.”
Pretty sure?  How the hell can you know that?”
“I’ve developed a knack for telling when someone is lying or telling the truth, especially about this kind of thing.”
“How would she know it’s mine if she’s been sexually active with other guys?”
“Look, I don’t have all the answers.  The fact is, you two have been sexually intimate--more than once, I understand.  Well, now she’s pregnant; she says it has to be yours and I believe her.”
“Why would you believe her?  I can’t believe her; she never told me she had been with other guys.”
“That’s one of the main reasons I do believe her . . . she didn’t try to hide it from me.  She’s a rare bird, that one.”
I sat there hunched over, wringing my hands between my knees.  The news that she was definitely pregnant had been blow enough.  Now I had to wrestle with the knowledge that there had been others with whom I had shared these forbidden fruits.
“John’s waiting for us to come up to his office on the third floor.  I’ve told him all of this already, but he wants to talk with you.”
“I don’t want to talk to John.”
“You’ve no choice.  Consider his position.  He’s going to have to face the music from his superiors, and, if word of this gets out, maybe even the government of Sierra Leone.”
As much as I wanted to cut and run, an invisible force seemed to convey me to the third floor, alone.  While Kadiatu remained under Crandall’s watchful eye, I took each step up the wooden staircase--haltingly, much like a doomed man must mount the steps to the hangman’s noose, knowing he will be forced to make the climb if he resists, but also wondering to himself why he cannot stop putting one foot before the other as he climbs inexorably to meet “the undiscovered country.”



Chapter 28


“Whirl is king.”  
I lifted that sentiment from my disintegrating paperback copy of Loren Eiseley’s fascinating odyssey, The Immense Journey, a quotation originally attributed to Aristophanes.  Aristophanes was a Greek playwright writing nearly four centuries before the birth of Christ and best known for his comedies.  I suppose I can imagine a character in a comedy speaking these words.  But the nagging image of a half empty glass tells me Hamlet or Macbeth or particularly King Lear might just as easily have spoken them as his fortunes spiraled out of control.
I confess I have never read Aristophanes; nonetheless, an astonishing wisdom about the nature of things seems to be contained in those three words.  Whirl is secreted all about us, harnessed under the hoods of the sleek vehicles we drive, hidden in the white and silver boxes that keep our food refrigerated, our clothes and dishes clean.  It spirits us on wings above the continent and brings light to the shadow that darkens half the planet each day.   It can open a can of green beans, a garage door, or summon Pandora to unlock the box of virtual reality at the press of a button.  It has made America the wonder of the industrial world, driving our conspicuous consumption and our material prosperity.  In science it has become axiomatic that electrons whirl about the nuclei of atoms, planets about the sun, galaxies about their brilliant cores—all stirred by invisible forces in this mysterious soup that we call the universe.  
As my biological clock begins to run down, I grow more unsteady in the world’s dizzying whirl.  Images of past years dart to and fro in the fishbowl of my frontal lobes as I live on in nostalgia for what can be no more.  Weeks, even months skitter by, leaving in their wake a cluttered montage of the life I have lived.  Adding injury to insult, my vertigo became more pronounced in the year before I retired.  I struggle to keep my balance physically as well as mentally, to anchor myself in the surety that yesterday was Tuesday and, therefore, today must certainly be Wednesday.  It seems important to my sanity—so I will not be charged for all those doctor appointments I fail to keep or the unreturned library book in the bathroom.  Absolute certainty about any topic or fact has fled and I marvel how often those younger members of the media, who would orchestrate our living, use with unwarranted casualness the word “absolutely.”  
I check my bearings with my wife, eight years my junior, who suggests I return to the childhood habit of churchgoing to keep at least a weekly tether on this “whirl” of existence.  But I fear it is too late for that, and continue to grow more and more unfettered in the seamless recurrence of darkness and light, a flow increasingly less fragmented into hours of the day, days of the week, weeks of the month, and so on—those boxes of the Western mind legislated by Pope Gregory XIII centuries ago, which each returning Leap Year reminds us don’t quite contain the natural order of things.  
In the prodigal days of youth, didn’t time move with glacial slowness?  Didn’t minutes dance vibrant before the eyes, their palettes of color ablaze, plumbed by frenetic buzz and liquid bird song, and, yes, the forlorn wail of distant trains in the night?  Didn’t summer suffer sting and itch and wet kisses?  Now, like a passenger on a bullet train, sealed in the stale cabin air from the graying landscape of autumn flashing by, being seems to have fallen away, drawn to the lifeless, decomposing earth like the whirling drift of leaves. 
“Whirl” is a state of mind which I believe Africa sowed in my brain.  Certainly, those last few weeks in Sierra Leone spiraled into a giddy blur.  My dreaded meeting with McClellan passed without strict censure.  It had the same sangfroid as the brief “Sex Education in West Africa” session during our training at New Paltz State University, when they segregated the “girls” and “boys” into separate groups—the “boys” with the group’s male doctor and the “girls” with our female nurse.  The weighty miracle of bringing new life to the world or the searing consequences of unforeseen pregnancy—these considerations were tactfully side stepped.  Instead we focused during those two hours of discussion on more germane concerns: sexually transmitted diseases purported to be rampant in Africa, and how to best protect oneself.  I remember our fraternity of males erupting in raucous laughter when a member of the group innocently volunteered he had heard Saran Wrap might serve as well as a mass produced condom if the latter was not handy.
McClellan, operating with the same tepid pragmatism as the doctor in training, did not berate my foolishness for becoming sexually involved with a student; he didn’t even rant about the potential embarrassment to the Peace Corps or himself.  Though he brought the possibilities up, he did not see anything to be gained by such unseemly measures as whisking me back to the States or even moving me to another school.  No mention was made about what might happen to the baby Kadiatu carried, or to Kadiatu.  As they say on the street, shit happens.  Best not to poke the sleeping bear; take it a day at a time; keep the whole thing under the radar—after all, only a few weeks remained before my flight home.  Keep a sharp eye out for symptoms of STD’s.
While climbing the stairs to his office I had determined a sketchy course of action.  If our secret held till the end of the school term, I would marry Kadiatu—not in Sierra Leone, however.  I would return to the States, then send for her. We would be united in a quiet civil ceremony that even members of my own family would not be invited to, for how could I ever face my parents with the consequences of my transgressions, particularly my mother.  After our marriage, we would settle in some large eastern city, far from my Midwestern roots, where a biracial couple might not be so conspicuous.  Marriage seemed to me the right . . . the responsible thing.  Yet when I asked myself if I loved this young woman enough to build a durable relationship with her, I sensed the chilling truth I had ignored since the beginning of our affair.  Tina Turner’s anthem of the 80’s sums it up best: “What’s love got to do with it?”  To me love--the kind of rare, improbable love I craved--was still signified by my perception of the relationship I once envisioned I would someday have with Diane, the girl I dated in my senior year at the University of Missouri.  It was made up of nebulous, unfocused images set against a backdrop of Victorian propriety, backlit with moonlight and captured in iambic pentameter.  No sweat soaked sheets, no naked bodies tearing their “pleasures with rough strife,” no sucking sounds or leaking body fluids, no flatulence or barn breath, no discord that could not be brought to harmony again with a soulful kiss belonging to Kay jewelers.
Yet whether I truly loved Kadiatu or not, how could I dismiss the life drawing nourishment in the dark sea of her “behleh”?  For therein lay the karma dictated by the death of the watchman’s child.  In the quest to experience that heart-stopping ecstasy so desperately sought by most of humankind, I had, unwittingly, entered nature’s contractual obligation with all living things—insuring life’s continuity. 
And so I proposed to Kadiatu.  Not down on my knees, not proffering a tiny, purple velvet-covered box containing a bit of bling to seal the bargain.  The fact that I did not indulge her with these ritual gestures probably speaks volumes about my perception of our relationship.  In fact, I don’t remember exactly how the compact was concluded, only that it became a fait accompli and, shortly thereafter, Kadiatu informed me I was expected to present myself for an audience with her mother.
Had I known all the foolish decisions I had made would lead to these awkward encounters, first with authorities of the Peace Corps and then with Kadiatu’s mother, I’m certain I would have been more reluctant to give into her invitation to become her Peace Corps lover.  Nonetheless, the appointed day of the meeting arrived on fleet mercurial feet.  I met Kadiatu outside Nolan’s compound and we drove into a maze of jerrybuilt panbodies, the kind that proliferate out of sight of Freetown’s main thoroughfares.  The streets in these areas, if they could be called such, shrank to a width that barely accommodated the American Jeep’s presumptuous bulk, providing no other course of exit than backing out the way one entered.  Sighing inwardly as Kadiatu finally pointed down a lane barely wide enough for motorbikes and pedestrians, I parked the Jeep, making sure all the doors and windows were secure. Then I followed my bride-to-be as we picked our way on foot up the narrow, slippery lane bisected by a foul rivulet of wastewater.  
I fought to remain unaware of my surroundings—contrary to the well intended advice given people who find themselves in strange or threatening situations—as we stepped over small tributaries flowing from each residence into the lane’s center.  But wariness stabbed like green apples in the pit of my stomach.  The foreboding I experienced climbing the stairs to McClellan’s office was nothing compared to each portentous step on this earthen gangplank.   Eyes—curious, watchful, prying eyes—peered at us from darkened doorways, open windows, and sagging stoops.  The further we got from the security of the Jeep, the more I lagged behind.  Kadiatu, sensing my aversion to this errand, turned at intervals, hands on hips, urging me to hurry.
At last she waited beside a shack that appeared, if possible, a tad shabbier than the rest, her eyes shining with the fever of expectation.  A tall, heavyset girl, who looked nothing like Kadiatu, stood in the doorway.  I was introduced to her stepsister, a formidable young Amazon who pushed open a makeshift door hanging on leather hinges.  
I found myself in the presence of a shrunken crone, old enough, it would seem, to be Kadiatu’s grandmother.  Life had obviously not been gentle or kind to this woman.  She lounged regally on a tattered easy chair in a corner of the cramped room, an intimidating presence eager to exact a pound of flesh from any ready victim: the interest due for what she had endured.  My heart sank while my mind silently mumbled prayers for safe passage through an afternoon mined with portents of disaster.
“You are late.”  The words were curt, directed at Kadiatu.  “We are waiting for over an hour.”
Kadiatu stood transfixed, wringing her hands as she stared down at the crazed, faded linoleum remnant covering part of the dirt floor.
“That may be partly my fault,” I volunteered.
Her mother’s eyes traveled over me with pecuniary interest.  “So, this is the Peace Corpse who wants to marry my daughter?”
“Yes . . . yes, that’s me.”  My self-deprecating attempt at humor fell on deaf ears.  Outside, I could hear the chatter of a curious audience beginning to gather in the lane leading to the shack. 
“Why do you want to marry my daughter?  She has no dowry.”
The interrogation, incisive and intimidating, caught me off guard.  Though I had not looked forward to this meeting, I suppose I had expected a nervous flurry of “My Lord Worship’s,” an exchange in which I wore the robes of authority while Kadiatu’s mother genuflected at each word I dropped.
“I . . . I love her,” I blurted.
The drawn face snorted at this.  She turned her head toward Kadiatu.
“This one,” she pointed a claw at Kadiatu, “tells me you will not marry her in Sierra Leone or live here.” 
    “I plan to marry her . . . in America . . . if that’s alright.” 
“But she says you are leaving for America without her?”
“Yes.  I thought it best to send for her after I have found a place for us to live     . . . and a job.”
“Are things done this way in America?  If you love her, as you say, and will be separated from her, why do you not now send for her in Waterloo?”
“Our marriage is a secret,” I said.  “The headmaster and students must not know.”
“I see,” she said, eyeing me narrowly.  “But surely a man must want to spend time with,” she gestured again at Kadiatu, “his wife . . .  if you are to be separated for a time . . . and if you love her, as you have said.  Is this not the case in America?”
Checkmate.  She raised a bottle of Star beer to her lips, waiting with crafty patience to see how I would reply.
“Yes,” I said at last.
Her eyes bore through me like black drills.  “Then I shall send her to you.”

* * * * *

The bureaucracy of the Peace Corps, in its wisdom, provided two paid visits to a dentist, one during training in the small town of New Paltz and the other an exit visit to a dentist in Freetown at the end of our two years in Sierra Leone.  This, someone had deemed, was adequate attention to the welfare of our teeth.  The first visit in New Paltz was a piece of cake for most of us who had made regular twice a year visits to a dentist, but woe to those who had impacted wisdom teeth.  My roommate in Scudder Hall at State University College had the misfortune to be one of them.  For nearly a week after the operation he lay in our darkened dorm room taking his nourishment through a straw, dropping nearly fifteen pounds, his cheeks and jaws swollen as if chock full of unshelled walnuts.  
I was not nearly so lucky in my exit visit, having acquired five cavities during my two years in Sierra Leone.  As I sat in the waiting room waiting to be called into the dentist’s office, a commotion began in the hallway.  Two young oriental men helped a third into the room: Taiwanese sailors off a merchant ship, I would later learn from the dentist.  They had gotten into a brawl with a gang of young men in a bar near Kissy at the eastern edge of Freetown’s harbor.  
As the two lowered the third into a chair, I found it difficult to look at the face of the miserable fellow in their care.  His face had been punched and kicked till it was nothing so much as a mass of bruised, disfigured pulp, his lips and eyes swollen and blood caked.  Someone had sent them to the dental office to begin the reconstruction of that poor tortured face.  An involuntary shutter passed through my body as I thought of that night when Kadiatu and I had escaped from the gang of young toughs who caught us necking in the Jeep on Lumley Beach. 
Another event occurred that stoked the growing fears I had for my safety.  After school one day, Alie, the captain of our six man football team, the boy who had been so frightened by the stoning incident in Freetown, and another student named Francis, trailed after me as I crossed the field to the science lab.  Francis, one of Peninsula’s tallest students, traveled by lorry each day from the east end of the Freetown harbor.  He reminded me of the cab drivers in Freetown, rayon shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, gray school shorts rolled up to the top of his slick thighs—testing each day the boundaries of Peninsula’s dress code.  Why both Clifford and Lyon hadn’t kicked him out became a mystery, for he had shown nothing but contempt for the Adventist teachers and made regular visits to the headmaster’s office only to be seen later, machete in hand, cutting the omnipresent brush on the compound, or with a bucket and rag swabbing out the outhouse.  Josh and I enjoyed the status of being cool in his eyes because we didn’t always react to the sassy rebuttals in class or the four-letter words he liked to sprinkle in conversations with us outside the hearing of others.
“Mr. Livingston—one bell!”  Francis yelled.
I stopped, waiting for the two to catch up.  Alie seemed to hang back, but Francis came right up to me, invading the personal space customarily granted a white school master, his head towering over mine by at least half a foot. 
“Mr. Livingston, boys are saying you are fucking Kadiatu.”
“Ladila!”  Alie exclaimed under his breath.  “Wetin dis boy i de takh so?”
I tried to suppress the blood rushing to my face.  “What boys?” 
Francis hooked his thumbs in the front pockets of his shorts, his arms akimbo, his eyes holding mine.  “Are you fucking Kadiatu, Mr. Livingston?”
“What do you mean by asking a question like that?”
Alie, obviously uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was headed, pulled on one of Francis’s arms.  
  “Yu noh de tahk so na di mastahs, Bo.  Lehf im.  Leh wi go!”
Francis shrugged off Alie’s hand.  “Mr. Livingston, if Kadiatu is with the beleh and you are the father, I will hunt you down and kill you.  I will find you, no matter where you go, and I will kill you.”
The cold menace in his eyes and the set of his mouth raised the hair on the back of my neck.  This courtly concern about Kadiatu’s honor triggered the memory of an afternoon several months earlier when I had given Kadiatu a ride to Freetown.  Francis, having no money for a bus or lorry, had begged to tag along.  The two of them sat in the back seat and it wasn’t long before Francis began his assault, pawing at her breasts, trying to kiss her on the neck and then the mouth.  She appeared to resist, but he was insistent.  I should have stopped the Jeep and kicked him out, but I feared that doing so might betray motives I wanted to keep hidden.  Finally, I had enough and yelled at him to cut it out.  Slowly, reluctantly, he had obeyed.
Alie yanked harder on Francis’s arm and at last he turned to go.  I watched their departure, wondering where this would lead.  Was it all going to blow up in my face before I left for the States?  Rumors of the “secret” had obviously begun to circulate.  Doc Crandall’s words came to mind—Kadiatu had been sexually active with someone else.  Could it have been Francis?  Was that afternoon trip to Freetown the beginning of something between them, or perhaps merely the continuation of something already begun?
* * * * *
Pedar Knudsen, the pastor in Bo and head of the Sierra Leone Adventist Mission, paid a surprise visit to the house one day after school.  I hadn’t seen him in several months and the visit immediately increased my paranoia. Had word already gotten as far as the city of Bo of Master Livingston’s transgressions?  It didn’t take me long, however, to discover the pastor’s visit had its usual self-serving agenda.  His mood, more cheerful than usual, had been buoyed by the knowledge that he, Birgitte, and the boys would soon be headed home to Denmark two weeks sooner than my departure for the States.
He wanted to make a deal to buy back the Renault.  His older sister in Denmark had no car and he thought the Dauphine would be perfect for her.  For my part, I had been in a quandary about how to dispose of the car before leaving.  I couldn’t afford to ship it back to the States, and had I the money, it still wouldn’t have been worth the cost.  Nolan and I had driven it to Monrovia, Liberia, during the week-long break between semesters after the New Year.  Unfortunately, Liberia’s roads were in worse shape than Sierra Leone’s, and on the return trip we drove faster than caution would have dictated, hitting at nearly fifty miles an hour a deep rut that cut across the road.  The jolt nearly knocked the car off the road.  We stopped to assess the damage but, despite the jarring impact of the incident, found nothing other than a small dent in the splash panel.  However, less than seventy-five miles later, the tire on the front passenger side blew.  Upon inspection we discovered it had worn on a bevel all the way through to its steel belts.  Though neither of us had much knowledge of the mysterious workings of cars, we soon deduced the earlier impact had evidently knocked something in the front end out of whack.  So, after replacing the blown tire with a nearly treadless spare, we limped into Bo where we purchased a new tire.  A Syrian mechanic did what he could to band-aid the Renault’s front end.  A permanent fix would have required parts he didn’t have and time we didn’t have.  So we made the drive from Bo to Waterloo with fingers crossed, stopping every thirty miles or so to examine the wear on the tire.
Visually, the car appeared in excellent shape.  I had put very few miles on it and only the tell-tale cant of the steering wheel revealed its crippling wound.  Pedar’s knowledge of cars, like mine, extended no further than rotating tires, changing the oil and keeping an eye on the gas gauge.  When he offered £150, I felt compelled to tell him what had happened.
With a used car dealer’s wiliness, he adjusted his offer to £100, a number, seeming innocent in its wholeness, but insulting, nonetheless—a mere £200 less than I had paid him the previous year.  In no position to bargain, however, I accepted his offer; it would rid me of the little red white- elephant.  Thus, we shook hands and Pedar cut me a check on the spot.  The sale solved another problem troubling me.  I wanted to leave Kadiatu with a modest nest egg which I planned to supplement with a monthly allowance once I got settled back in the States.  I had become so concerned with my own safety—Francis’s aggression coupled with all of the images of savagery that had shaken my peace of mind over the past two years, including the threat relayed to me by Mr. Kamara—that I sat down one night and penned an aerogramme to my older sister about the predicament I found myself in.  It was the first and only confession I would ever make to a family member.  I sketchily outlined my affair with Kadiatu, her pregnancy, and the concerns I had about whether I would be able to exit Sierra Leone in one piece.  I told her about the bank account I planned to set up for Kadiatu and asked her to see that the $75/month stipend set aside by the Peace Corps during my two years in Sierra Leone also was deposited in that account if anything happened to me.   
The following week I made one last visit to the shabby panbody where I had been cross-examined by Kadiatu’s mother.  Luckily, Kadiatu was at home alone and I whisked her off to Barclay’s Bank to set up a passbook savings account, explaining to her the process of withdrawing money from it.  Saving face in the presence of the unctuous bank clerk became a further source of embarrassment.  I had no idea how the monthly allowance I wanted to send her might be transferred from an American bank to Barclay’s in Freetown but he was able to dismiss my ignorance in pedantic detail as he explained how these “marvelous” transactions were conducted.
When we returned from our excursion, Kadiatu’s mother had returned.  She seemed considerably more hospitable than in our first meeting, offering me one of her warm Star beers and insisting I take the seat of honor on the ragged easy chair.  Still, an awkwardness hung in the air.  The beers nearly finished and the pretense of amicable small talk exhausted, her mother asked when school would be out.  Armed with that information, she instructed Kadiatu to be prepared to visit Waterloo on the eve of the last day.  Trying to be tactful, I countered that such a trip was hardly necessary; Kadiatu and I could say our goodbyes now.
Glowering, she spat back, “You wish to marry my daughter?  Then you want to leave her . . . before you will spend a night with her?  What kind of man are you?”
What kind of man indeed?  A too, too cautious man?  America’s incarnation of J. Alfred Prufrock?  The cowardly lion?  In these imploding seconds of my existence, I had been divested of any remaining vestige of self respect.  The playing field had not just been leveled; the wizards of earthmoving had presumed to elevate the meek.  I, the face of privilege, compassionate ambassador of America’s largess—that land showered with God’s blessings from sea to shining sea—paragon of humanity’s long journey from the stuff of stars, had been reduced to the object of this wretched woman’s mockery.  But I knew in my heart I deserved no less.
And so, on the eve of the last day of school, Kadiatu knocked at the front door of our house in Waterloo.  Even Josh thought she had begun to show, but the traditional dress she wore neatly disguised the fact.  She hadn’t been to school for weeks, and because of the boys, I tried to create the ruse that they were witnessing the farewell visit of a former student.  I kept a physical distance between Kadiatu and myself while they were in the house, but she carried the scent kind of perfume that drove me crazy.  It even drew a sarcastic innuendo from Santigie.
While Josh and I began getting dinner ready, Kadiatu went downstairs to visit with Alimamy and Santigie.  I longed to be a fly on the wall in their room but I would have understood only bits and pieces of their conversation.  I had to simply trust Kadiatu to keep our secret, even though judging by the confrontation with Francis, the veil of secrecy left had been shredded.  Already, it had become difficult for me to look Alimamy and Santigie in the eye.
There was to be an assembly the following day, both because the school would be shut down for a little over a month and in order to stage a formal send off for Mr. Livingston.  I knew I would be expected to give a short speech.  After dinner, I shut the door to my bedroom and began crafting the sentiments for this last hurrah.  I wondered what their farewell gift would be.  Would there even be a gift?  Did I deserve one?  After all, the students had spent a great deal of money on Clifford’s robe, and the attention of the third form kids was elsewhere, preoccupied with the agony of waiting for the results of their West African exams.  And then there was the matter of my duplicity.
After a while Kadiatu came back upstairs from the boys’ room.  Josh detained her in the dining room, pumping her with questions about her family, particularly about what she knew of her absentee father, and what she was doing now that she no longer attended school, tactfully circumventing any mention of her condition.  Meanwhile, I tried to focus on my message to the student body, but it was like wringing water from a dry sponge.  I had experienced and absorbed so much in these two years, most of which I couldn’t share publicly.  Now it was time to capture and distill in words, if not the particulars, at least what weighed upon my heart as I prepared to leave Peninsula and Sierra Leone, most likely never to return.  I knew, if nothing else, my experience in Africa had left a profound mark, some might have called it a scar.  Nothing so intense, so strikingly unique, had ever entered my experience.
However, in the prevision of the inquisitive eyes of my audience my thoughts festered, infected by what might be in the minds behind those eyes.  Would they be thinking about the possible self-serving motives that had brought me to Africa: because I couldn’t find a job in America as some of my African colleagues seemed to believe; because of some misguided notion of romantic adventure, or for that elusive sexual intimacy I had never been man enough to seize from women in my own culture?
Frustrated, I abandoned the speech and went to the refrigerator to get a beer.  It was nearly dark outside; the boys still had not lit the Petronax lanterns.  But at that moment I heard the creak of a door, then the soft slap of bare feet on the steps leading up from their room.  It was Alimamy.  Wordlessly, he filled the lanterns, then pumped and lit them.  Meanwhile, I busied myself making an elaborate show of preparing a pallet on the living room floor for Kadiatu to sleep on and placing her shabby little suitcase beside it.  The gesture was both contemptible and fruitless, but I felt I had to do something to cast some dim aura of innocence over Kadiatu’s overnight stay.  
Having finished his task, Alimamy simply said goodnight and retreated back downstairs.  Josh and I sat talking at the dining room table for awhile, speculating about how the students might have fared on the exams.  I asked him how plans for the wedding were coming along and where he and Michelle might honeymoon.  With the rainy season nearing full swing, I wondered what they were going to do about the leaks in the roof.  He had spoken to Lyon about the possibility of moving back to the bungalow on the hill, but had heard nothing definite.  Where would Orville go if they were to move back up there?  He replied that he had heard a rumor Orville might not be returning the following year, news that concerned but did not surprise me.
Finally, I said goodnight and retired to my bedroom.  Kadiatu followed and when I motioned for her to leave and return to the living room, she gave me that petulant, challenging glare.  So I grasped her by the hand and dragged her back to the already prepared pallet, bidding her goodnight in a voice loud enough to be overheard downstairs in the boys’ room.  
The night grew hot and sticky.  I lay back on my pillow, wanting to fall into a sleep so deep it would dispel the countless contingencies whirling like planets in my head.  My remarks for the assembly the next day remained unfinished, but I couldn’t keep focused enough to get my thoughts in order.  I lay there turning from one side to the other, listening for suspicious footsteps beneath the window.  After a time, I managed to drift into that anomalous limbo between sleep and wakefulness when, suddenly, I sensed a dark presence stealing toward the bed.  Struggling to sit upright, I started to yell “Get away!” but the words were strangled by a paralyzing numbness in my tongue.  Then an awareness of something else insinuated itself into my senses—a scent—the scent of Kadiatu when she had walked in the front door of the house.  A small warm hand clasped my arm.
“Mr. Livingston,”—the voice innocently soft.  “Do you want me to spoil the child?”  The question crossed the space between us like the guileless murmur of flowing water.
“What?”  I had heard that expression, “spoil the child,” before, but it took me a minute to process it.  Spoil the child—not as in spare the rod and spoil the child.  It was the Krio expression for having an abortion.  “No . . . no!   I do not want that.”
I tugged at the hand that clasped my arm, pulling her into the bed.  We lay on our backs in silence, not touching yet all the while her subtle scent trickled into every lusting fiber of my being.  Rolling on my side to face her, I watched as her fingers loosened her lappa, noticing, in the moonlit darkness, the plump rounding of her belly.  As I reached to touch it, the unexpected tread of someone—the watchman or one of the boys?—rasped in the gravely soil beneath the window, suspending the motion of my hand.  The footsteps, however, gradually faded away, and my fingers resumed their journey over the sensuous latitudes of this tantalizing and newly created mound in her flesh.
We often use the expression “sweet nothings” to describe what passes for conversation between lovers.  What did I know?  She would lapse into Krio and when I would say “What?”  she would grumble, then repeat the message in monosyllabic English.  I had made her a slave, she said.  How did she know if I had been faithful?  What about Christiana—did I still have the love for her?  The baby inside her “beleh” did not seem a thing of wonder or concern to her as she babbled on in the language of fairytales much like the letter she had sent when she first expressed her desire to make love to a Peace Corps boy.
At the ripe old age of twenty-three I became painfully aware that I was lying next to a child in the wondrous body of a woman.  And yet that night I had never desired anything so much, a desire driven by my ignorance of when we might ever make love again, wondering, just the same, would I ever keep my promise to send for her.  Then, suddenly, the words of Andrew Marvell’s complaint to his coy mistress nearly 300 years earlier whispered in the night air: “now like amorous birds of prey, let us at once our time devour.”  Oblivions to the narrow bed’s complaints, the creaks and groans raising an alarm in the breathless night, we made love with a fervor that swept aside all pending considerations.  Wouldn’t someone surely overhear our love making?  Might we hurt the baby with our exertions?  I didn’t know, nor did the questions cause me caution.  
After nearly an hour of this, we lay back exhausted, rinsed of desire, waiting for blessed sleep to stake its claim, our restless minds still resisting that claim.  Finally, I rolled upright at the bed’s edge.  The mosquito netting remained draped in festoons from the wires above my head.  With complete indifference, I noted we had failed to take this standard precaution against the blood-sucking vectors of malaria.  With luck, our thrashing about might have saved us.  I got up, walked around the bed, reaching out my hand to clasp hers and pull her upright.
“Come, leh wi go.” I said.
“Usai?” she inquired, yet surrendering to the tug of my hand.
“You’ll see.”
I led her into the dining room and up the stairs to the door to the roof.  Cautiously, I opened it, fearful that it, too, might creak and groan.  The moon was now partially obscured by a roiling bank of clouds stalled over the Colony Mountains.  Toward the plain in the east, heat lightning flickered among thicker bands of clouds.  My hands on her smooth, pliant shoulders, I steered her to the balustrade surrounding the roof.  Suddenly, the moon broke from behind the clouds and the hillside behind the house glimmered in a lustrous cascade of light.
I wondered if she had ever been this elevated above the world around her.  “The moon is beautiful tonight.” 
She made no response, but turned her head to look up into my face.  The moon’s light revealed the delicate sculpturing of her own face as with doe-like submission and tenderness,  a yearning rooted in something beyond my experience, she seemed to drink from my eyes.
“Why do you bring me here?” she asked, but with no note of annoyance that the question might have implied.  “Does my loving not please you?” 
“I brought you here because your love pleases me very much, because it is beautiful like you,” and I drew an arc with one arm to indicate the prospect before us.
“I do not like the night.  It hides too many things.”
“But the moon makes it so beautiful.”
“The moon is a liar.”
The child woman my arms encircled, who over the course of the last year I had shared so many intimate hours with and who earlier had related her adolescent fantasies of our future, had just uttered something so bluntly cynical it stunned me for a moment.  Somehow, she held in the axis of her intellect a perspective of reality I could not reconcile with my own.
We left the roof, forsaking my fantasy of moonlight’s charm, closing the door with the same care as it had been opened.  In the bedroom it was difficult to recover the passion we had interrupted.  This time she became the aggressor and led the way to a harder won climax.  To paraphrase the one author whose musings about Sierra Leone I treasure most—I had so much to learn.  
As our energies ebbed this time, the fairytale of our future in America was elaborated again.
“How can you be sure you will be happy in America?”
She answered, in a quickly concocted bit of nonsense or else a conundrum I have never been able to tease meaning from, something about “two together happy as long as together happy.” 
That two people could discover ecstasy again and again, thrashing about in each other’s embrace until the wee hours of the morning—this was a prodigious feat I had never envisioned.  Exhausted, the taste of ashes in each kiss, we at last fell away into the void of sleep.  When I awoke the next morning to gray light, I discovered it had been raining.  Not one of Sierra Leone’s torrential downpours but a persistent, gentle rain, rare at the beginning of the rainy season.  I rose on one elbow and turned to look at Kadiatu.  The coolness of the air arced into an involuntary shiver as it always did, part of it brought on by the chilliness of the air, part by the knowledge that whatever we had discovered in this night’s loving it might be the last time I would ever touch her chocolate flesh, hold her in my arms, or feed the piranha hunger of my eyes.  Still asleep, her naked body curled in a nearly fetal position, her swollen belly exposed to the world, I felt the burden of a tenderness I was afraid to express.  I beheld, déjà vu, the image of the pregnant woman sleeping on the ferry that had carried a group of Peace Corps Volunteers across the harbor to Freetown two years earlier.   
I glanced at the clock.  It was 6 am.  The boys would be up soon, scurrying through the chores they had to complete before school.  In a panic, I nudged Kadiatu, trying to wake her.  I wanted her to move to the pallet I had prepared on the living room floor.  With the same catlike nonchalance of the woman on the ferry, her eyes opened as she stretched then rubbed them, oblivious to my anxiety, the 20th century clock ticking in my head.
“You have to get up and go lay on the bed I made for you in the living room . . . until the boys come up to do their chores.”
She stared at me, the alien wonder from another world, then shook her head.
“Yes!  C’mon,” I hissed.  “Get up . . . just pretend you have slept there until the boys—”
“—No.  A noh go do em,” she answered archly.
“But you must.  That is why I made the bed in the living room last night.”
She merely closed her eyes, walling out my anxiety.
I looked at the clock once more, then jumped from the bed, realizing I, too, was in my birthday suit.  Undeterred,  I found and pulled on my underwear, tiptoed to the living room, curled up on the pallet, and pulled the flimsy bedding over me, waiting for either Alimamy or Santigie to appear.  The inanity of this little subterfuge did not escape my notice, but what else was I to do at such short notice?  I reacted in the flimsy hope that they somehow might believe Kadiatu and I had not slept together, desperately ignoring the obvious: why would Kadiatu, a third form African school girl who hadn’t been in class for weeks, be lying in the science master’s bed?  Nevertheless, when Alimamy appeared at the head of the stairs, borrowing a page from Kadiatu’s waking mime, I uncurled, stretched, and rubbed my eyes.
“Mornin,’ Alimamy,” I mumbled, feigning drowsiness.
“Good morning, Mr. Livingston.”  
I cringed at the downcast eyes, the furtive, uncertain silence with which he went about his chores and wiped up the leaks from the roof.  What was he thinking?  What was he thinking?  As I rose and began rolling up the bedding on the floor, my mind fluttered and beat helplessly to free itself from the sticky strands of the web it found itself once more snared in.
Josh shuffled from his bedroom toward the kitchen, first cigarette of the day already burnt down to his fingers.  He looked at me peculiarly as if to ask “What the hell are you doing out here?” but instead said, “My God, I guess the dry season has finally ended.  Maybe we can finally have a real shower again.”  I followed his gaze out into the leaden day.  Yes, Josh would have his showers again.  But for me the rain only channeled the chilling blight of some indefinable loss.
But it was just another school day, and I had a short farewell address to give.  I knew the scholars would be disappointed because I had failed to memorize my remarks and would have to read it from the script I had quickly fashioned.  I was even hesitant about the content for I had taken a daring and reckless leap, repeating to them the poem from Kadiatu’s first love letter, “My Heart Is Like a Cabbage.”  I became increasingly uncomfortable as I realized that in trying to keep my affair with Kadiatu secret, I had built a wall between myself and the students I had come to help, a wall that extended even to my relationship with Alimamy.  I tried to explain in my speech how much more blessed I felt they were than many American students their age, for despite all the privations they had endured, I never ceased to be amazed at their proclivity for happiness, however brief, and I would carry the memory of those beatific smiles and their spontaneous moments of joy back to the States to tell American children of this wonderful mystery.  But I realized all of this would be said with a hollowness in my chest, wondering if they harbored unvoiced resentment in their own hearts hearing these words from the young white man who had been raised in the world’s cornucopia of privilege and well-being.  What would be going through their minds as I gave my speech?  How much did each of them know of my clandestine affair with Kadiatu and was that reason enough to condemn me for coming in the guise of an ambassador of hope?  Had I, in fact, played the role of an ugly American? 
As Josh backed out of the drive into the rain, I looked up and thought I saw the brief shadowy form of Kadiatu in the window of my bedroom.  It was the same window that framed that suspended moment of disbelief in Headmaster Lyon the day he paused to confirm the substance of this seeming mirage—the fleeting image of a young African woman in the bedroom of a Peace Corps teacher—before climbing back into his car.  
She would be gone by the time I returned in the afternoon.  Suddenly, the rain intensified, drawing a veil over the window and the house as our trusty steed, Silver, carried us to the place where my life’s vocation of teaching took its first awkward steps and where I would hear with aching heart, one last time, the scholars’ acappella rendering at assembly: 
Lord in the morning Thou shalt hear
My voice ascending high;
To Thee will I direct my prayer,
To Thee lift up mine eye . . .

* * * * *

Before my final departure, I received an aerogramme from my sister in St. Louis which assured me she would see that Kadiatu received the funds the Peace Corps owed me.  I suppose this may seem of small consequence to some, but it meant everything at the time to know that someone was still in my corner and, despite knowing the particulars of the bed I had made, would do all in her power to carry out my wish to atone for mistakes I no longer had the power to undo.
On July 16, 1964, a Thursday, I made my last trip to Freetown with Josh.  Alimamy rode along.  I cradled in my lap a farewell gift from the students at Peninsula wrapped in newspaper, an astonishingly beautiful carving in brown ebony of a Yoruba woman’s head.  Because I had neglected to get an African memento for my mother, I would give the carving to her on my return.  She, in turn, would have a lamp made from it which she kept until her death in 1998.  The lamp has been on my desk since then, lighting the darkened way to memories. 
Memory can be a fickle thing.  So much of those two years is forever etched in my mind, like the rings at the very center of a tree.  But of the trip to Lungi airport I remember very little.  Whole blocks of it are gone, as if in fumbling over the computer’s keys to undo a word or phrase, someone had accidently pressed “delete.”  I remember being in a parking lot somewhere close to Freetown’s harbor, saying goodbye to Josh and promising to send him a life-sized snapshot of a green salad, that staple of American cuisine which only the foolhardy would indulge in West Africa.  I shook Alimamy’s hand warmly, wanting to hug him but losing my courage when he could not look me in the eye.  I don’t remember a ferry ride to the other side of the harbor but surely it occurred and,  just as surely, I would have turned away from the improbable symmetry of a sight that would roll the stone from the White Man’s Grave, unsealing it for resurrection in memory and dream—the stark image of a West African woman, a stranger lying on the wood bench running nearly the length of the ferry’s deck, lost in sleep’s parallel universe, her swollen abdomen resting against the vibrating wood, oblivious to the blinding sun and the persistent thrumming rhythm of the ferry’s engines—a vignette from which I would have drawn one final likeness of Kadiatu. 



Epilogue

“Only in the act of love, in rare and hidden communion with nature, does man escape himself.”—Loren Eiseley

On September 22, 2011—just over ten years after Osama bin Laden launched his preemptive attack on the World Trade Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and forty-nine years after the members of our Peace Corps group had settled into their teaching roles at all points of the compass in a small West African Country most of us had never heard of—my wife and I pulled into the parking lot of the Key Bridge Marriott overlooking the Potomac.  Exhausted by our drive from Philadelphia and the stress of having lost our way in the maze of streets, road repairs, detours and general gridlock that seems to be emblematic of our nation’s government, we registered, took the elevator up to our room, and collapsed on its inviting king-sized bed.
The Peace Corps had decided to celebrate its 50th anniversary with a reunion, so thousands of its alumni descended for four days of meetings, sightseeing, and dining out in Washington.  Thanks to the marvel of e-mail, a technological advance that would have been to die for during the 1960’s in West Africa, our group was well represented at this gathering.  For a couple of years prior to this event, our group, christened Sierra Leone II, had been trying to arrange its own small reunion ,but without success.  The general Peace Corps celebration seemed a fortuitous opportunity to once again plan a get-together where we would share our unique histories of the past forty-nine years and our memories of Sierra Leone.  Thanks to the energy and persistence of a few members, especially Char Roycht and Tony Russell, our group began to plan, via e-mail, its own separate agenda for those four days.  We all submitted mini-biographies to Tony who compiled them into spiral bound books distributed at our first meeting.
Some thirty-five of the original sixty members of our group were able to attend this reunion.  Some drove; some flew from as far away as Europe and the west coast of the United States to be there.  Six were deceased; one, Pat Preciado, had been tragically murdered in South Africa.  When Pat returned to the United States she obtained a medical degree and eventually migrated to South Africa after apartheid ended to become a primary health care physician ministering to victims of violence in the Eastern Cape.  Her selfless concern for others is only part of that “act of love” that Loren Eiseley spoke of which has defined the lives of so many returning Volunteers.
Our reunion began with a bountiful reception and dinner at the Hay-Adams Hotel, hosted by Char and generously underwritten by Bob Hopkins, another member of the group.  On Saturday, the 24th, Rufus Tiefing Stevenson, one more of the guiding lights of Sierra Leone II, welcomed us to a luncheon at Sumah’s West African Restaurant, where we savored the gustatory and olfactory memories of true Sierra Leone cuisine.  Later that afternoon, we met in the basement of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church to give each member an opportunity to bring the rest of us up to date on his or her life over the past 49 years, or simply reminisce about our unforgettable experiences in West Africa and its impact on our lives.  For so many of us, this was a moving experience; it rekindled that camaraderie that those months of training in New Paltz had shaped and the meeting became the emotional highlight of our reunion.  As Tony would later write, “The feeling for each other, when most of us hadn’t see each other for nearly fifty years, was startling,” and “I was humbled and honored to find myself among such friends.”
I came to the meeting bearing a troubling confession.  Yet despite my apprehensions, I welcomed the opportunity to finally come out of the closet about my relationship with the young woman I have called Kadiatu.  I had begun that coming out on this very blog as I wrote the story’s chapter installments and submitted one every two weeks.  But now it was time to face my fellow Volunteers with that story, for up to that time I had shared my secret past in person with only my friend Nolan, roommate Josh (both fictional names), the Peace Corps administrators in Sierra Leone, my sister, and my wife.  I am reminded of Mimi Alford whose brave little book, Once Upon a Secret, came out in 2012.  She feared, and rightly so, there would be those who would ascribe to the book’s revelations ulterior motives, who said it tarnished some of our cherished perceptions of a beloved President, John F. Kennedy, and the glowing Camelot mythology that grew out of his personal charisma. 
I, too, feared that some might feel I had besmirched the reputation of the Peace Corps or was simply out to titillate readers with the sordid angst of a young man’s bildungsroman. So I salute Mimi’s brave excursion into her long hidden past, for I discovered in it the courage to finish my own.  Ironically, her unique story parallels this one in its setting in time, in the dynamics of the relationship it reveals, and the agony and misdirection of all those years it was kept secret.
Through the four day experience at the Peace Corps reunion, I came to realize just how grateful the majority of my fellow Volunteers were to have had the Peace Corps experience, and how that experience has affected their lives.  And even though it may often sound in this narrative as if I didn’t exactly treasure my own experience, I can say now, without hesitation,  that I did and I do.  It has not been my intent to denigrate the people of Sierra Leone, nor the Peace Corps, nor the Adventist Church and its missions in Africa, nor the many other church missions that have for years worked in near anonymity to improve the lot of Africa’s citizens.  My aim has always been to put down—as my youthful perceptions recorded it and as my fading memory has retrieved it—the events and emotions that I experienced from August of 1962 to July of 1964.  The number of times that I have embellished the truth as I remember it for narrative expedience or because memory has failed me can be counted on one hand. 
The experience gained in Sierra Leone taught most of us lessons I wish every young American could learn, especially those who take for granted what we enjoy in the U.S.  The first lesson might be called gratefulness, a humble, not prideful, gratefulness for all the blessings it is the privilege of most Americans to enjoy.  The second is awareness—awareness of what our thoughtless and wasteful consumption of those blessings is costing our planet and how this impacts our relationships with all of the other people with whom we share the earth.
I wrote this book because I have always believed a wholeness existed in the combined separate narratives of my experiences in Sierra Leone.  I decided to bring it to the public eye because I believed that despite the egocentric cynicism of my youth, the mistakes I made, and the nagging regret I could never shake, there was meaning in its telling.
  The journey the members of Sierra Leone made across the Atlantic, often to live among pre-historic cultures like those of our ancestors, turned out to be much more significant than any of us realized at the time.  It was, to borrow Loren Eiseley’s word as he traced the steps of the emergence of human life upon the planet, immense, unique in its substance and its consequences for each of us.  Our individual journeys cannot be measured in miles or increments of time for it took us into the timeless, unplumbed depths of the heart.  Other writers about Africa have mined kindred journeys: Joseph Conrad in his Heart of Darkness and Graham Greene in The Heart of the Matter, for example.  
Some would argue that the “heart” is simply the stuff of fictional romance unless we are referring to that small beating fist, faithfully pumping life into our bodies.  The other heart, referenced in greeting cards, poetry, and countless narratives, has no physical existence.  Yet we bandy this word about as if it were a thing tangible, something you might stub your toe against.  In our culture, we symbolize its likeness on valentines, bumper stickers, and in miming our affection. “Love,” that other amorphous entity, nearly synonymous with our references to the heart, is likewise an invisible force.  Like anti-matter it exists ubiquitously, but is known only by its effects, not its corporeal substance.  Strangely, despite the intangibles they try to capture, both words speak to that which seems to define what is best in human behavior.
In a musty box in my study lies a small stack of blue aerogrammes which have followed me in many migrations across our country these past fifty years.  Some of them have a Sierra Leone postage seal, an artist’s rendering of a climbing lily, some an additional stamp that bears an early likeness of Queen Elizabeth II in memory of her visit to Sierra Leone in 1961.  On most, however, the postage has been cut away, a mystery I cannot explain—perhaps I once knew someone who had a streak of philatelic madness.
Half of the letters are from Kadiatu, half from other students at Peninsula, most of those from Alimamy.  The boys allude to the difficulty of their studies and their dreams of going to an American college some day.  Most politely ask after my health, wish me the best in the pursuit of a Master’s degree, thank me for the textbooks or money I have sent, hint at the financial difficulties of getting an education in Sierra Leone, and petition for pen-pals, namely “the most beautiful girl in America.” There are progress reports on the football team and the results of their West African promotional exams.  The latter is a bit dismal as few passed in English.  Mysteriously, a higher percentage managed to pass the science exam.  Mariama writes that she obtained a certificate in four subjects as, of course, we all knew she would.  Likewise Mohammed was successful in all six of the subjects he took exams in.  Alimamy thanks me for the money I have sent and the “study time table” that he says enabled him to place 5th in his 4th form class.  Tactfully, no one mentions Kadiatu in these letters.
Kadiatu’s letters are more difficult to read, for they bear the story of the difficulties of her pregnancy and the birth of the baby boy she says she has named after me.  She finds a job teaching in the Kissy Infant School, but her first month’s salary and the most recent money order I had sent to Barclay’s bank went to pay for a party—for rum, for stout “by the carton”—to celebrate the “Christian” baptism of the baby.  She promises to be more frugal, but I learn that all of the £100 in her savings account is gone, spent on a party thrown by her mother to celebrate the coming marriage of her daughter.  She warns me of the white girls in college who will try to steal my heart from her.  The baby is well and she herself happy.
There is a final aerogramme in November of 1965.  Evidently I had written to her explaining that I had decided it would be best for both of us if I did not send for her. and thus I could not marry her.  She admits the news stunned her, made her cry, but stoically accepts the rationalizations I have given: “I have left everything to god, he knows everything under the burning sun.”
“It is what it is,” as our culture has become fond of saying.  I never heard from Kadiatu again.  I have no answers to the many painful questions our story raises.  I am certain most readers will have already guessed what some of those questions are and may understand how I tried to answer them with a growing stock of rationalizations.  But I have come to believe over the years that rationalizations, like alcohol or drugs, are a way of numbing the mind when it is forced to face regret—the errant paths we have chosen, the foolish decisions, the mistakes of omission and commission.  How do we go on with our lives, continuing to enjoy the blessings of living in America while living with this burden?
So many well-meaning people have expressed their forgiveness for my betrayals, and have given counsel to leave the past in the past.  But forgiving oneself does not necessarily follow.  There are no hypnotic spells, no holy oils, no sanctified waters to wash away what each individual perceives as his or her failed responsibility.  So often during our years of marriage my wife has asked, “What’s wrong? You seem off somewhere in deep thought.”  And I, so grateful for her love, for her enduring compassion that has filled my glass beyond measure, answer “Nothing,” pulling back once more from the  precipice of depression.
Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet’s great soliloquy that “conscience makes cowards of us all.”  But that is the voice of a cynical young man who, if only for a moment, contemplates suicide as the possible answer to his mushrooming regret.  For I believe conscience, another member of the invisible world of forces that drive the actions of humankind, helps to mold what is best in our common humanity.  It may even be one active force of loving, but like love, the consequences of its dictates can be painful.
Among the friendships rekindled at our group’s reunion in Washington, I certainly treasure mine with that character in my narrative known as Harlan James.  Harlan was the Volunteer who faced down the young ruffians on the balcony of the PC rest house in Freetown.  His real name, Hap Cawood, is the byline for a writer who has retired from his role as editorial editor for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio.  If you read his prose, I think you will see why I believe the people of Dayton have been enriched by his years of service to their community.  Hap is also the author of a novel, The Miler, praised by running advocates not only for its portrayal of a competitive runner’s agony and exultation but also for its sensitive recreation of the dreams and unsung lives of Harlan, Kentucky’s citizens in the 1950’s.  
Hap was the first speaker that afternoon in the basement of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.  The tragedy of the civil war in Sierra Leone lay heavy on all our hearts that afternoon.  Though I had seen flashes of the barbarity that would surface during the years from 1991 – 2002, I suspect that most of our group could never have imagined that having to be distant spectators to this carnage would also be part of our immense journey.
In its muted eloquence, Hap’s summary of the common denominators of our experience in Sierra Leone and the significance of those moments of communion in the basement of the church provided closure and a fitting benediction to our journey:
When we finished our debriefings in Freetown in 1964, I doubt that we were thinking about the distant future, much less whether we would ever get together again.  We were thinking about going home and about the business of getting on with our careers.
Now, almost half a century later, we are in a sense writing the epilogue of the story we began when we arrived in New Paltz.  We are having the chance to reflect on our shared experience and the ephemeral drama of life itself.
Your biographical sketches bring our story full circle, in a way.  Many experiences were reported simply, in the ease of acceptance and reflection that time has afforded us.  We don’t need an abundance of detail to guess what each of us might have gone through in different ways: the heights and the depths, the lessons learned, all of us seasoned in the schoolhouse of the world.
And what blessings we have had, many unspoken and deeply personal, and other blessings outward like the opportunity to serve together.
As children born into a world war and matured in a cold war, we were given the opportunity that no American generation had been given before.  Our youngest president, who would pull us back from Armageddon and who died too soon, believed in our capacity for peaceful work abroad, and called us to it.
We felt the lift of the tide of history and the brightness of the days, moving us with a sense of purpose into a great adventure in which the American people wished us well and paid our way.
Beneath it all was a risk—that we might make missteps that would harm this new cause.  We coped with that and other great pressures, too, heavy with the distance from our homes.
To my surprise, in November of 1999, for the last project of my newspaper career, I had the chance to go back to Sierra Leone.  This time I didn’t enter Freetown on a ferry, but on a Russian military helicopter with a soldier aiming his machine gun out the open door.  I was with two congressmen confronting the aftermath of the horrific, heart-rending assault on Sierra Leone earlier in the year.  It was an experience of extreme highs and lows—the pain of the suffering, and the inspiration of the forces that were now arrayed against it.
When a Peace Corps friend read my series, he asked if I thought our work there had been in vain.  I didn’t think that at all.  I don’t think any good is lost, even though good seems overwhelmed sometimes.
We received more than we gave, and don’t even know the extent of what we did, any more than our students and the people of Sierra Leone know what they gave us.  What we know is that we returned stronger and wiser than we went.
You have family who know you, you have friends who know you, you have co-workers who know you.
But only we here know the mix of anxiety and anticipation with which we trained.  We have the remnants of Mende and Temne and Krio in our brains.
We know the scent of the rainy season and the smell of textbooks in the tropics.  We know the life without telephones.  We know the driver ants and mongooses, lorry rides, jollof rice. O level exams, and a place we called home in another time, on the far side of the world.
It is to me a wonder that we were there, and that we are here again. 






Dedication
TO:  The thousands of anonymous victims of the civil war in Sierra Leone and to our deceased colleagues who have joined them in death:
Eva Ashley
Anne McLaughlin Kuyper
Pat Preciado-Elliot
Clara Rathjens
Maureen Bonfield Russell
Bernadine Sikora
John Hammack Smith
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
One short sleep passed, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”
      —John Donne

TO: The living citizens of Sierra Leone who carry on the brave work of rebuilding their country and their lives, and to the living members of the Peace Corps alumni and those current Volunteers who now carry the torch of service to all members of the human family:
“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
          —Robert Frost

TO: My precious, loving wife, Carolyn, who has abided my black angers—those offspring of my “foolish deeds”—and who patiently taught me what true love is:
“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hour and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
        —William Shakespeare


                                © Gerald D. Mills, 2013