The attack came at dawn on Nov. 11. Some 800 African warriors advanced on the picket guards Johnson had posted at the outskirts of the settlement. The Africans opened fire; several of the guards were killed, the rest ran back to the settlement, yelling.
Quickly, the African force seized control of the western part of the settlement. But instead of pressing their advantage, the African army began looting the houses they had attacked. The colonists grabbed their cannons and swung them into force. Meanwhile, five musketeers, led by Johnson, circled around to the African warriors’ flank and opened fire.
Crowded together, they were easy prey for the cannons and guns. “Every shot literally spent its force in a solid mass of living human flesh!” Jehudi Ashmun, a white A.C.S. agent, wrote later. The dead: 100 African warriors; 12 American colonists.
Not satisfied with their victory, the colonists and their descendants made up stories of a fantastical heroic colonial woman, Matilda Newport, who, they said, lighted a cannon with her pipe and blew up the native warriors. The story became legend, and eventually, Liberia would officially recognize Dec. 1 as a day of thanksgiving, Matilda Newport Day.
The descendants of the colonists — the Congo People — would have parties and feasts to celebrate Matilda Newport Day.
The rest of Liberia’s population, who descended from the Deys, the Bassas, the Kpelles and the Krahns, among others, would not join in those festivities.
It never occurred to me at that time that all across Liberia, native Liberians were getting more and more upset about the things I took for granted: things that, for me, were as normal as the crow of the rooster every morning.
Sugar Beach, 1978
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES of America was coming to visit!
Monrovia was incoherent with excitement. The government declared it a national holiday. President Tolbert ordered spanking new American limousines to take his entourage to the airport to meet President Jimmy Carter.
Eunice and I ran from Sugar Beach to the main road leading to Robertsfield airport at 8:30 in the morning to take up our positions on the motorcade route. We had one goal, and one goal only: Amy Carter.
We had worked with other Liberian kids on a gigantic mural that had a picture of a blond girl with braces surrounded by a bunch of African kids. Under the picture, we wrote: THE YOUTH OF LIBERIA WELCOME YOU, AMY.
The entire Tolbert cabinet went to Robertsfield. Since my cousin, Cecil Dennis, whom we called Uncle Cecil, was minister of foreign affairs, he was right by Tolbert’s side when President Carter showed up. No traffic was allowed, and the roads, freshly washed, gleamed in the sun.
“Wha’ you will tell Amy when you see her?” Eunice asked me. We were sitting on buckets we’d brought from Sugar Beach. There wasn’t a stick of shade on the side of the road.
“I’nt know.” The vast universe of things I needed to tell Amy Carter stretched before me, too infinite for me to corral into one straightforward statement. “I will ask her if we can move to Sinkor,” I finally decided. As much as I loved our huge mansion at Sugar Beach, it was way too far from town 11 miles. At 12, I wanted to be in the heart of the action in Monrovia.
“How Amy will move us to Sinkor?”
Good point.
“O.K., wha’ bout you? Wha’ you will ask Amy for?”
Eunice had been thinking about this for some time. “I will ask her to carry me to America w’ her.”
Now I felt guilty. I knew it wasn’t fair that Marlene and I got to go to America and Spain and Switzerland for vacation every year and Eunice didn’t.
I didn’t know what to say, and the silence just stretched. Then Eunice laughed: “I just joking! Who want go to America?”
We went back to peering down the asphalt in the direction of Robertsfield. Where was the motorcade? All along the road, more people were showing up from the bush, milling around.
We were the only ones who had brought buckets to sit on.
The sweat was rolling down my back as the hour stretched into two, then three. Sammy Cooper, our yard boy, arrived with oranges, sent by our cook, Tommy. “Y’all still waiting here?” he asked with a smirk, handing them over.
Tommy had already peeled the oranges for us, slicing off the tops so we could suck the juice out. Greedily I grabbed the biggest orange.
“Here them coming!” Eunice yelled, jumping up. From way in the distance, we could hear the sirens. Peering down the road, finally, finally, I saw the first lights.
I grabbed Eunice’s arm. “Wha’ you think she will be like?”
Oh, how we wanted to meet Amy! She was the daughter of the American president, and she had yellow hair!
The lights grew larger, the wail of the sirens louder. And then it was there, right in front of us going by so fast. The motorcycles in the motorcade passed us first. The police officers riding them glared at us self-importantly.
Then limousine after limousine was upon us. Which one was Amy in?
The motorcade stretched almost a quarter of a mile. Before we knew it, the cars had passed. Which one was Amy in? We hadn’t even seen Amy!
Never mind. Eunice and I went running down the dirt road back to Sugar Beach, skipping, jumping and yelling. “We saw Amy!” we yelled. “We saw her!”
President Carter stayed in Liberia for four hours. Then he left and went to Nigeria, where he stayed three days.
Monrovia, 1979
ON A RAINY MORNING in August, Mommee and Eunice swept into the office of Uncle Cecil at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The ministry was next to the Executive Mansion, across from the University of Liberia and City Hall. Eunice wore a pantsuit that Mommee had just had made for her by Gay, her tailor.
“Cecil, you know Eunice, my foster daughter,” Mommee said, making a formal introduction. “She’ll be graduating from high school next year.” Eunice sat in the leather guest chair, stuttering up a storm, so great was her terror. Uncle Cecil was one of the most powerful men in Liberia.
He smiled at Eunice, and she calmed down. Thirty minutes later, she and Mommee walked out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a promise from Uncle Cecil: that Eunice would get a government scholarship to go to college in the United States.
Eunice was giddy all the way home. She, Eunice Patrice Bull, who had never been out of Liberia and barely out of Monrovia even, was going to go to America for college. The possibilities were huge. The first thing she said when she and Mommee got home was, “I going to America.”
“A-ya, Eunice,” I said, my mouth open in admiration. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere until I graduated from high school — four years away.
“When I come back from America,” she bragged, “I’m gonna be a been-to.”
My admiration quickly turned to jealousy. Eunice was going to get to be a “been-to” before me.
Still, in 1979, the possibilities for me seemed huge as well. I was finally in the ninth grade.
Life had settled down since my parents’ separation a year before. I was suddenly tall. At long last, I had acquired breasts. People were telling me how much I looked like Mommee. I was consumed with matters important to a 13-year-old girl: learning how to do the latest dances, sweet-talking Mommee into buying me Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album, gossiping with Eunice late into the night about which boys we liked. When I look back now at 1979, the last tragic year of the Congo regime in Liberia, I wonder at how I could have been so clueless as to miss all the signs around me that screamed that the world as I knew it was about to end.
Sugar Beach, April 1980
DURING THE EARLY-MORNING hours of Saturday, April 12, 1980, native Liberian enlisted soldiers, led by the 28-year-old Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, stormed the Executive Mansion.
President Tolbert had just returned from a speech in downtown Monrovia to his private quarters on the top floor of the Israeli-built mansion overlooking the Atlantic. He put on his pajamas and went to bed. Around 2 a.m., 20 soldiers scaled the mansion’s iron gate. They quickly killed many in the president’s security detail.
It took them less than an hour to get to President Tolbert on the top floor. The soldiers bayoneted him, gouged out his right eye and disemboweled him. They put Mrs. Tolbert and the children under house arrest. Then they went on the radio to announce that Liberia was under new management. They asked that all government ministers and their deputies report to Barclay Training Center, the army barracks.
Uncle Cecil Dennis, the foreign minister, went to the American Embassy and asked for political asylum. He was turned down. Uncle Cecil then drove to B.T.C. and turned himself in. The fathers of a number of my Liberian schoolmates were arrested.
Eleven miles away at Sugar Beach, I woke up that Saturday morning to a bright sky. I walked out of my bedroom and heard Mommee saying to Eunice: “Don’t say anything to Helene yet. You know how excitable she is.”
“Don’t tell Helene what?” I said.
“There’s been a coup.”
“What’s a coup?”
On the radio, the broadcaster was saying that people should remain calm and that all government ministers should report to B.T.C.
“Wha’ will happen to Daddy?” I asked. My parents separated two years before, in 1978, and Daddy moved out, to live in town. On the weekends, he usually went up to the Cooper family farm in Kakata, where there was no telephone. Not that he could have called us anyway, since we didn’t have a telephone at Sugar Beach either.
The highest government position Daddy ever held was deputy postmaster general and he resigned from that in 1974. After spending years bemoaning the fact that Daddy’s choice to be a businessman meant we were more dependent on the whims of capitalism than the security of high-ranking government employment, I was suddenly hugely relieved. “Let him stay right up there at the farm in Kakata and don’t come down to Monrovia,” Mommee said.
Walking into the kitchen, I overheard the cook whispering to Eunice that the soldiers had a list of Congo People they were going to kill, and Daddy was on the list.
Eunice and I huddled in the TV lounge with Mommee and Marlene, who was now 9 years old. “At least we far from town,” Eunice said. “Nobody will be able to find us up here.”
Two days later, they found us.
Monday, April 14, 1980, was another dense, stifling day. I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking my morning Ovaltine, when I realized the servants had disappeared.
I wandered onto the kitchen porch. The yard was empty, the boys’ house deserted.
“Eunice!” I hollered.
“Wha’ you want?” she yelled back from somewhere deep in the house.
I didn’t answer, knowing that curiosity was the surest way to get her out there. Sure enough, she showed up about a minute later, barefoot. As soon as she walked out of the air-conditioned house, her glasses fogged up.
“Where everybody?” I asked her.
“Henh?”
“Tommy them gone.”
The two of us stood on the second-floor kitchen steps, looking out into the yard and beyond. We could see the doors to the bedrooms of the boys’ house were open, and the bedrooms were empty.
Like me, Eunice immediately became uneasy. “How everybody gone so?”
Then we saw the truck approaching the house, a cloud of dust trailing it.
Eunice and I bolted into the house, yelling: “Aunt Lah! Mommee! Soldiers!”
Marlene’s dogs were barking furiously, running up to the truck and then back to the house, as if they wanted to make sure the truckload of soldiers were properly escorted to us.
There were eight of them. One pulled up his belt and strutted to the front of the house. He looked at Mommee, standing above him on the porch, and grinned. “Everybody out of the house,” he said.
Marlene, Eunice and I followed Mommee down the steps into the yard. The dogs continued their excited barking and scampering.
“What do you all want?” Mommee said, articulating carefully.
“Where John Cooper at?” the lead soldier asked. Mommee told him Daddy was not home. She said that he didn’t live here anymore. Answering the soldier, Mommee made it sound as if we never saw him, which was not true.
The soldiers walked around the yard for a while, conferring among themselves. Then they ordered us to stand against the wall of the house.
All four of us moved to the wall. One soldier grabbed Eunice’s arm. “Not you,” he said. He pulled her aside.
Mommee, Marlene and I lined up against the house, next to the laundry room. Three soldiers pointed their guns at us. “We’re going to splatter your blood against this wall like paint,” one said. Then they fired into the air above our heads.
“Stop, stop, please stop,” Eunice said.
The soldiers were all laughing and grinning now. Marlene’s dog, Christopher Jr., ran to one soldier, barking furiously. One of them pointed his gun at the dog and made as if to shoot him. Marlene bolted from the wall, running to the soldier and jumping on his gun arm. He flung her to the side. Mommee ran and grabbed Marlene.
Mommee yelled at the soldiers. “What the hell is wrong with you! You want to shoot women? Then shoot! We’re going inside. We’re not putting up with this anymore.”
Mommee grabbed my arm and motioned us to go back into the house. “Speak for yourself,” I muttered. I didn’t think her Congo Lady of the Manor act was a good idea.
We went into the house, and the soldiers followed us inside. One turned to Eunice. “Where you da sleep?” he asked her. “On the floor?”
Eunice was calm. “Come,” she said. “I’ll show you my bedroom.”
She took the soldiers to her bedroom. When they challenged her that it wasn’t her bedroom, she showed them her clothes and shoes in the closets. “There’s my school uniform,” she said.
Another soldier grabbed my arm and dragged me into the TV lounge, closing the door behind him. I didn’t know what he wanted, even when he sidled up close. “Are you married?” he asked me, running his hand against my arm. He started to push up against me. He smelled like alcohol.
“No, I’m only 13!” I said. “How can I be married?”
“You’re fine, oh,” he said, taking my other arm.
Before I could respond, the door flew open. It was Mommee, with two soldiers beside her.
“Get that man away from my child,” she said. She walked in and grabbed me, dragging me with her into the kitchen.
Suddenly, the soldiers left. Just like that, they were gone. The four of us sat at the kitchen table. Mommee’s chest was heaving, and she was still shaking. “You think they’re gone for Daddy?” Marlene asked.
Mommee didn’t bother to try to couch her response. “Yes,” she said.
Marlene started to tear up promptly. I glared at Mommee. The least she could do was sanitize things for us.
Later that day, the soldiers came back, walking straight through the kitchen door and into the foyer by the piano, as if they owned the place. Marlene, Eunice and I stood in front of the TV lounge while they took Mommee aside. I couldn’t hear what they said to her. She looked fixedly at the lead one, then kept turning and looking at the one who had taken me into the TV lounge and asked me if I was married. He looked at me and smiled, then said something to her. She was shaking her head violently. He kept talking, she kept shaking her head furiously. The lead one started talking again, smiling too. I couldn’t hear them.
Then Mommee pointed at the one who had taken me into the TV lounge and said something to the lead one. He looked at the other soldiers. They all started grinning.
Mommee walked over to Eunice and pressed a key into her palm. “The three of you go into my bedroom and lock the door from the inside,” she said. “Whatever you do, do not let anyone in.”
By now, I was crying. “Where y’all taking Mommee?” I said. The soldiers were herding her down the stairs to the basement. She yelled over her shoulder, “Just get in the room.”
We locked the door of Mommee’s room and sat on the floor, looking at one another.
We heard three gunshots from downstairs.
My heart convulsed.
“Eunice, they shooting her?”
“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” Eunice was saying to Marlene. Marlene had crawled onto Eunice’s lap, and Eunice was cradling her like a baby, rocking her back and forth.
Eunice looked at me. “They not shooting her,” she said quietly. “They jes’ tryin to scare her.”
There were three more shots.
“I going downstairs,” I said, starting to get up.
“No!” Eunice yelled at me, her voice sharp, her stutter uncharacteristically absent. “Sit back down. For once in your life, do wha’ Aunt Lah told you to do.”
I slowly sat back down. Finally, somewhere inside, I started to understand what was happening.
Oh, God, please, don’t let them hurt my ma.
Finally, we heard the truck leaving the yard. We were terrified to unlock the door.
Then came a loud knock. “Open the door, that me,” Mommee said.
She walked into the room, eyes flashing with anger. She was unkempt, her T-shirt loose on her, as if it had been yanked or stretched. Her hair was undone, one hairpin hanging from a clump at the back of her head.
She stripped off her clothes and headed straight into the bathroom to the shower.
“Those damn soldiers gang-raped me,” she said.
She left the bathroom door open while she showered, and Eunice, Marlene and I hovered at the door. We just stood there, listening to the water run, watching her behind the glass.
Again and again, she washed. She stayed in the shower for almost an hour.
As I stood in the doorway, my muscles were tense, my fists clenched. Finally she turned the water off, and the three of us moved away from the bathroom door. When she came out of the bathroom, she had a gun. “If they try to come back here, I am shooting them,” she said.
We never left her bedroom that night. Eunice and I lay on the floor, and Marlene lay in Mommee’s bed. Mommee sat in a white leather love seat holding the gun. She gave each of us a Valium tranquilizer. I lay awake wondering why people always said tranquilizers were strong medicine. The one Mommee gave me wasn’t strong at all.
I stared at the shadows on the ceiling until dawn broke. And when it did, we left Sugar Beach.
Monrovia, April 22, 1980
THE TOP MEMBERS of Tolbert’s government were on trial. The accused were all familiar names and faces: Uncle Cecil, Clarence Parker (the father of my classmate Richard Parker), J. T. Phillips (the finance minister and father of my classmate Elbert Phillips), Frank Stewart (the budget director) and nine more. There were 13 in all.
I had finally gotten my wish: my family had moved from Sugar Beach to Aunt Momsie’s house in Sinkor. We still hadn’t heard from Daddy, although rumors were floating around that he had been arrested and was at the army barracks. Liberian TV broadcast the trials every night, and we watched, alternately terrified that Daddy would show up on trial and hoping that he would, because at least that would mean he was alive.
The trials were in a conference room at B.T.C. with bare cement walls. The accused men sat before the five-member military tribunal. On the beach outside, four high poles had been erected.
The public crowded into the trial room to watch the proceedings, while outside, hundreds of native Liberians danced and celebrated as the former government officials were brought in.
On Tuesday, April 22, I turned 14.
I went to school. Five miles away from my algebra 1 class, the new minister of information, Gabriel Nimely, spoke at a press conference at the Executive Mansion. “Gentlemen of the press,” he announced, “you are all invited to some executions.”
Asked who would be executed, he replied, “Enemies of the people.”
Hundreds of native Liberians crowded and danced on the beach near where four execution poles had been placed by the Atlantic Ocean. Then two large mechanical hole cutters and five additional poles were brought to the site and quickly erected.
Now there were nine execution poles standing. Inside a bus, 13 men, including Uncle Cecil, sat huddled.
The soldiers opened the door of the bus and pulled out nine men. They marched them to the poles and tied each to one. The soldier assigned to shoot Uncle Cecil was drunk and a poor shot. Uncle Cecil, wearing only his jeans, stared him straight in the face. The bullets kept missing him. Then he closed his eyes and mouthed a prayer. One soldier screamed at him: “You lie! You don’t know God!”
The bullets continued to miss Uncle Cecil, who continued to stand up straight — now with his eyes closed — as the other eight men fell, one by one. A brief fight broke out as one of the other soldiers tried to take the position of the soldier assigned to shoot Uncle Cecil.
Finally, the soldier who kept missing Uncle Cecil ceded to the new soldier, who positioned his Uzi, walked up to Uncle Cecil and opened the gun into his face. The crowd cheered, and the soldiers dragged the bodies from the pole. They took the remaining four men to the execution poles. When they were done, they sprayed all 13 bodies with automatic fire, emptying, and then replacing, their ammunition clips.
We watched it on TV.
In particular, we watched Uncle Cecil die, noting how he kept his head up until the end; how he didn’t look scared, but proud; how he didn’t beg; how the soldier kept missing him, and what that meant. Eunice’s stutter became more pronounced, making her almost impossible to understand. “Th-th-th-they k-k-killed those people,” she kept saying.
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The next day, we went back to school. We were in algebra class again when the door opened with a huge sweep and Richard Parker walked in. There was a moment of stunned shock, then I yelled “Richard!” and leapt from my desk and ran to hug him.
Then the whole class crowded around Richard.
“Na mind, ya, Richard.”
“Aye man, Richard, I so sorry.”
“I sorry ya.”
“Na mind, na mind.”
“Aye ya, Richard, na mind.”
Richard was smiling and shaking his head. It flashed through my mind: How are you supposed to act at school the day after your father is executed by a firing squad? Mrs. Boyce gave up on quadratic equations. She walked over to Richard and put her hand on his shoulder, before walking out of the class.
I was so overcome with shame about my birthday connection to the execution. I felt as if I were partly to blame, because they killed his father on my birthday.
It was the same thing I would do for the rest of my life when something bad happened: focus on something else. Concentrate on minutiae. It’s the only way to keep going when the world has ended.
My own father surfaced the next day: in the hospital.
Soldiers had gone up to the farm in Kakata looking for him, but mostly wanting money, since he wasn’t on the primary list. They took him outside and started taking potshots at him, mainly to scare him. He said, “You damn soldiers are so drunk you can’t even shoot straight.” So they shot him near the groin.
But then they drove him to Catholic Hospital in Monrovia. We raced to see him — Mommee, Eunice, Marlene and I. “What possessed you to say that to those people?” Mommee kept asking him. I looked at Mommee and snorted. She was a fine one to criticize anyone for saying stupid things to soldiers with guns.
That day in the hospital, Mommee and Daddy told us that we would leave Liberia. Mommee would take us to the States, and Daddy would come after his wound healed.
Eunice would not be coming with us.
Eunice was in the middle of her senior year in high school. She told Mommee that she wanted to stay and finish. She would go back home to live with her mom, with whom we all kept in regular touch. Mommee didn’t push the issue.
We went back to the house at Sugar Beach one last time to get our things.
I packed Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album and my favorite purple pants. I went to the music room to get two of our family photo albums. Clutching them, I walked to the French doors behind the piano in the music room and looked out onto the porch, across the yard and onto the ocean. Fierce-looking clouds were gathering; there was a storm coming.
Whitecaps were taking over the water.
“You girl, wha’ you will do wi’ these books?”
Eunice was standing behind me. In her hand she held “The Secret of the Old Clock,” the first Nancy Drew book in our collection.
“I can’t carry ’dem,” I said.
“You want me take ’dem?”
I nodded and followed her back up the steps, past the TV lounge and to the sleeping quarters. We parted at our bedrooms, across the hallway from each other.
I put the two photo albums into the suitcase. The tears were starting now. All my life I had wanted to leave Sugar Beach, and now I didn’t want to go. I went to my bookshelf and started pulling down books, which I shuttled to Eunice. I made three trips, before she stopped me.
“Aye, tha’ enough.”
“But wha’ bout the Barbara Cartlands?” We had both started reading paperback historical romances and imagining we were English roses.
“I na taking that stupidness.”
Then she started laughing. “O.K., gimme ‘The Bored Bridegroom.’ ”
Mommee appeared at the doorway. “Y’all ready?”
As we pulled out of the driveway, the house at Sugar Beach was absorbing the first fat raindrops of a thunderstorm.
“Don’t cry,” I told Eunice, as we left her at Robertsfield airport. “You’ll get to come to the States soon.” I needed to hold on to that belief even though I had no way to know whether it was true.
Eunice shook her head. “I’ na crying.”
“Yeah, you crying.”
“Wha’ bou you?”
“I gwen to America. Wha’ I will be crying for?” I said through my tears.
Eunice laughed. “A-ya you foolish Cooper girl. You gwen to America.”
“Eunice you wi’ mind ma Nancy Drew books?”
“Look, you girl, don’t mae’ me laugh tonite.”
“Maybe you wi’ come w’ Daddy when he come.”
She said nothing, just hugged me, then grabbed Marlene, who was bawling. Somehow I knew that when Daddy joined us in the States, he would not have Eunice with him.
Mommee turned to Eunice, whispering something into her ear and pressing something into her hand.
Then we were walking out to the tarmac at Robertsfield, up the steps and into the Pan Am DC-10. The cabin engulfed us in its foreignness; it was as if we were already in America, with its carpets and air conditioning and air fresheners.
I hadn’t seen Mommee break down during the whole month since the coup. But when the plane’s engines raised and it accelerated down the runway, her chest started to heave with big, wracking sobs.
September 2003
MY INSIDES WERE SCREAMING when my Ghana Airways plane touched down at Robertsfield and taxied down the runway. Finally, it came to a stop, the bell dinged that signals you can get up, the airport workers brought the steps to the plane and the flight attendant opened the door.
My throat caught the scent of burning coal fires mixed with the dampness of the rain. Gripping my bag, I stepped out onto the steps, home again, a 23-year “been-to.” Images filled my head, from both past and present.
No more procrastinating; it was time to go and find my sister.
Helene Cooper is the dilpomatic correspondent for The New York Times. This memoir is excerpted from her book, “The House at Sugar Beach,” to be published in September by Simon & Schuster.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
Ann
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