The Darling by Russell Banks
I took a small step into the shop. He heard me and looked up slowly, then recognized me. “Miz Sundiata? You back? When you come back?”
“A day ago.”
He put the magazine on the floor. “Why?”
“To look for my sons,” I said.
He shook his head slowly as if he didn’t quite understand.
I said, “You remember them, don’t you? My three boys?”
He nodded slowly, as if calling them back to mind one by one.
“I saw you still had your shop, and because you send messages for people, I thought you might have heard or seen…”
“I don’t got no more shop. All them boys gone now!” he blurted. “Gone!”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. Can’t say.”
I asked him when was the last time he saw them.
His gaze came back into focus. “Long-long time ago,” he said. It was after President Doe got killed by Prince Johnson and before Charles Taylor drove Prince Johnson out of the capital. “Them boys, your sons, they got famous for a while. They had famous names, too,” he added. “Peoples all over was very-very scared of them. Scared of all them crazy boys with the guns and the bad names. Still are.”
I asked him to tell me their names, and he did. He said that because their father had been a minister in the government of Samuel Doe and their mother was an American white woman, everyone remembered those three. “The big one, the oldest, he call himself Worse-than-Death. The twin boys named Fly and Demonology. Last time I seen ’em, I was hidin’ from the soldiers,” he said. He wasn’t sure whose soldiers they were, but they had smashed up his shop, and he had fled to the roof of the building, where he had a clear view of the body-strewn street below. “There was dead peoples everywhere for a long-long time. That’s when I seen ’em.” He told me that the two younger boys wore women’s nightgowns over their trousers, and the older boy had on orange coveralls and no shirt. All three were carrying guns, all three were wild eyed and grinning, filthy, running from store to store and screaming bloody murder. Until they stopped over the crumpled body of a man. Reuben said they kicked it a few times to be sure the body was dead, then rummaged through the pockets. When they came up empty, the older boy, Worse-than-Death, stripped a watch off the man’s wrist and tried in vain to pry off his wedding ring. One of the twins, Fly or Demonology, he wasn’t able to tell, reached under his nightgown and pulled a bayonet from his belt and sliced off the ring finger, jammed the bloody end into his mouth and sucked the ring from the finger. Then the boy stuck out his tongue and showed the ring to the others, and when the older brother reached for it, the twin swallowed it and laughed and started running again. The other two followed, and the brothers darted across the deserted street and disappeared from sight.
Slowly I backed from the shop to the street, my sneakers crunching against broken window glass. “After that,” Reuben said, his voice rising, “they was just gone! No one saw them boys again, Miz Sundiata!” he called after me. “No one!”
When I got to Duport Road, the gate to our house was open, and there were four young children at play in the yard, white children, three little girls and a boy of about eight, and they were speaking American English with a southern accent. I told them that I was Hannah Sundiata and that I had lived in this house a long time ago. The children led me to their parents inside, a serious, blond couple in their mid-thirties named Janice and Keith Crown, Evangelical Christians from Ashville, North Carolina. Janice and Keith were intensely polite and eager to talk with an American visitor. When I told them who I was, they said that they knew of me and had heard of my chimpanzee sanctuary at Toby and that it had been destroyed in the war. The Crowns had been in Liberia and living in the house, which their church had leased from the government, for nearly two years. Previously they had worked in Haiti, they said. After the war ended and Charles Taylor was elected president, their church had established, with President Taylor’s permission and help, a series of small missionary outposts in the backcountry. Keith, who had a pilot’s license and a single-engine plane, kept the missions supplied with medical equipment, medicines, schoolbooks, hymnals, mail from America for the missionaries and Bibles for the natives. Keith and Janice and their children liked the house on Duport Road very much, they said, and on Sundays Keith conducted religious services for the local people right here in the living room, although Keith confessed that it was easier to bring God’s word to the natives in the backcountry than here in Monrovia. In the city, he explained, people had been severely traumatized by the horrors of the war, and many of them had reverted to Islam and ancient forms of animism. “But people in the bush are very open to Christ’s healing spirit,” he said, and Janice agreed.
They asked me if I was a Christian, had I been saved, and I said no, which seemed not so much to disappoint as to surprise them. This part of the story I told to Anthea, who like me is not a Christian and has not been saved but, unlike me, probably doesn’t need it. It was the end of October, and I was at my desk paying the monthly bills. Anthea came into my office off the kitchen for her pay and, apropos of nothing, attempting perhaps to fill in a blank that I had placed in an earlier version of my story, asked me what became of my house in Africa. I thought that she would find the presence of the Crowns in my old home and their Christian missionary zeal ironic and faintly amusing, which she did. But when she asked if the Crowns knew anything about my sons, since I had already mentioned that the couple knew who I was and had heard about my sanctuary, I lied and said no and wrote out her check and gave it to her.
The Crowns hadn’t been in the country long, but they had friends in high places, as Sam Clement used to say, among them President Taylor himself, whom they claimed to have personally introduced to Jesus Christ, causing the president to be born again, they told me, adding that I should not believe the ugly rumors of barbarism, corruption, and decadence sown by his enemies here and abroad. Charles Taylor had many enemies, they explained, especially among tribal leaders who did not want him bringing Jesus to this benighted land.
When I asked them if the president considered me one of his enemies, they looked away, for it was difficult for them to lie. Keith said that the president knew that in the war my sons had supported Prince Johnson, who was his enemy and was hiding in Guinea and still plotting to overthrow him. Janice added that the president also knew about my husband and that he had supported Samuel Doe, and he knew, of course, that in the war, when the fighting reached Monrovia, I had left for America alone.
“What are you telling me?”
Keith walked to the door and told the children to go back outside and play. Janice was silent for a moment. “We’re not apologizing for Charles Taylor,” she said. “It was a brutal war, people on all sides did terrible things. Both during the war and afterwards. And we’re not judging you, Missus Sundiata. Only God can do that.”
Keith took his wife’s hand in his and in a soothing tone said to me, “In this house we often pray for you. And we pray for the souls of your sons and your husband. Surely, Jesus has forgiven them. Just as He will forgive you, if only you ask. Seek, and you shall find salvation, Missus Sundiata.”
I tried to explain that my husband had been murdered by Samuel Doe’s men, one of whom was known to us, and that my sons and I had witnessed it, and that my sons had joined Prince Johnson solely to avenge their father’s murder, not to oppose Charles Taylor. But that was my story, my truth, not Charles Taylor’s, and although they did not contradict me or call me a liar, the Crowns would have none of it. They nodded and looked at me with pity and a craven hunger to save me from myself.
It was a hunger that I would not let them satisfy. Without warning I told them that my husband’s body was buried in their flower garden, which surprised and confused them. “And I would like to be alone there for a few moments,” I said. I told them that my husband was a Christian, and they could put a little cross over his grave there and continue praying for his soul, if they wished. “I’
There is not much more to tell. It was September 10, 2001, and one dark era was about to end and another, darker era to begin, one in which my story could never have happened, my life not possibly been lived. I stood at the edge of the garden at the side of the house where Sam claimed to have buried Woodrow’s body and waited for my husband’s ghost to rise from the flowers and punish me, as the ghosts of my dreamers had done. But he was no longer there. I was alone in the garden. In spite of the Crowns’ prayers for the salvation of his soul, Woodrow had gone to be with his ancestors in Fuama.
And when I went back inside the house and stood in my boys’ bedroom, I was alone there, too. Their spirits had long since disappeared from the room, replaced by the bright spirits of the four children who slept there now. My sons were with their father and their African ancestors. And it made me glad. They were with their people, the people who, living and dead, were loving them in death as I had never been able to love them in life.
I came back to the living room and prepared to leave. The Crowns asked me to stay the night with them, for it was dark by then and dangerous on the streets of Monrovia. I accepted their offer, and later, during dinner, Keith mentioned in passing that the next morning he had to fly supplies from the small in-town airport to their mission outpost in Ganta, close to the border of Côte d’Ivoire. I asked if he would take me there with him, so that I could cross out of the country and return to the States from Abidjan, the way I had come in. This was perfectly agreeable to him, he said, but why not fly out from Robertsfield? I explained that I had entered Liberia illegally without a visa and did not want to alert the authorities, especially the president, to my presence in the country. I said that I was, indeed, Charles Taylor’s enemy. And that is how I got to Abidjan, where I boarded a Ghana Airways flight to New York and made my way home to a nation terrorized and grieving on a scale that no American had imagined before, a nation whose entire history was being rapidly rewritten. In the months that followed, I saw that the story of my life could have no significance in the larger world. In the new history of America, mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from the beginning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SPECIAL THANKS are owed to my assistant, Nancy Wilson, for her help with much of the research; to my agent, Ellen Levine, whose support and friendship have sustained me for, lo, these many years; and to my editor and friend, Dan Halpern, whose tact, intelligence, and trust guided me throughout the writing of this book.
Also, heartfelt thanks to Bela Amarasekaran of the Tacagama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Freetown, Sierra Leone; Sally Boysen at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; Gloria Grow of the Fauna Foundation, Chambly, Quebec; and the many other individuals around the world who have dedicated their lives to saving chimpanzees from medical experimentation, abuse as entertainers and pets, and outright extermination.
PRAISE
“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portraits of America more than any other—the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it.”
—MICHAEL ONDAATJE
“Russell Banks’s twentieth-century Liberia is as hellish a place as Joseph Conrad’s nineteenth-century Congo. The only creatures that behave with humanity are the apes. A dark and disturbing book.”
—J. M. COETZEE
“Hannah [the narrator of The Darling] is a descendant of Joan Didion’s alienated, terminally detached women … and she is a relative, too, of Graham Greene’s quiet but not so innocent Americans and V. S. Naipaul’s Western war tourists, who somehow imagine they are exempt from the chaos and violence they witness in their wanderings abroad.”
—New York Times
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BACK AD
THE DARLING
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-095735-2 (paperback)
ISBN 0-694-52423-9 (unabridged CD)
A political/historical thriller of terrorism, political violence, race, and cultures
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
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A story of love and sex, racism and poverty, and the failures of the American dream. American dream.
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A small-town morality play that asks: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?
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A Novel
ISBN 0-06-093086-1 (paperback)
A dazzling re-creation of the political and social landscape before the Civil War.
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The Stories of Russell Banks
ISBN 0-06-093125-6 (paperback)
Thirty years of Banks’s best short fiction, including eight new stories.
RULE OF THE BONE
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-092724-0 (paperback)
A journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal, and redemption.
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ISBN 0-06-092007-6 (paperback)
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A work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines.
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Explores the ethos of rampant materialism in a group of contemporary moral fables.
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A portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, and revealing.
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“A compelling novel… Banks achieves effects at once beautiful and brutal. A virtuoso performance.”—Publishers Weekly
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COPYRIGHT
THE DARLING. Copyright © 2004 by Russell Banks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Banks, Russell.
The darling / Russell Banks.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-019735-8
1. Americans—Liberia—Fiction. 2. Human-animal relationships— Fiction. 3. Animals—Treatment—Fiction. 4. Endangered species—Fiction. 5. Women—Liberia—Fiction. 6. Chimpanzees
PS3552.A49D37 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004047431
ISBN-10: 0-06-095735-2 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-095735-3 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780062123213
05 06 07 08 09 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Russell Banks, The Darling