The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 12
I had counted enough puddles when from behind I was pushed to the ground. A small boy and his mother rushed past me. Papa grabbed my arm and lifted me up, while some women who traveled behind us screamed. I turned around and four men, the prince’s men, rebels, moved through the crowd with long pipes the color of stones. Were those guns? They held them close to their bodies with straps that hung like purses, and none of them had drums. They were wearing plain clothes, dirty clothes, not uniforms, so they were not Hawa Undu’s men; they did not fight for the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL). They fought for the prince. They were not taller than my father. The boys looked younger than Moneysweet, and fire and sparks spurted out of the mouths of their guns. Another ran out of the sugarcane field pointing his gun toward the crowd. We were near the front of the crowd and the rebels approached from the back.
“Hands up!” he yelled.
Those who were running stopped.
“Lift your hands,” Papa said and I raised my hands in the air, copying the others around me. I did not understand why the boys were pointing their guns at us or what we had done wrong. Or where the drums were that they used to make the sounds. Papa was a good man. Many people told him this. And I thought I was a good girl, and always apologized when I pinched too hard and one of my sisters cried.
“Don’t cry,” Papa whispered to me.
“Walk!” one of the boys yelled.
So the crowd continued, all of us, with our hands raised in the air and their guns to our backs.
“You all government people here? Where the government people?” one of them asked, his voice a boulder, his words so close together it was difficult to understand. He spoke like those who lived outside of Monrovia. At the pastor’s house the women said that is where the prince found some of his boys to fight for him.
“Who government?” another one asked, poking the gun into the backs of members of the crowd, some of them begging and covering their heads. All of them had big eyes, sharp teeth and moved like they were playing football, chasing a moving target, but nothing was on the ground.
The rebels moved closer to us from the back of the crowd. Papa worked for the government. I looked at him, watched his face for what would happen next.
“Look ahead,” Papa said, low so only we could hear him. “Just keep your hands up, keep walking and looking ahead.”
The drums were loud in the distance and each step felt like an entire day had passed us. The many feelings of a whole day wrapped into those waiting moments, as the rebels got closer. What would Papa say when they reached him? Would they recognize him?
“You all come!” one of the rebels yelled from behind. “Government soldiers them not far.” We heard the others stop, their feet shuffling as they changed directions, only a few feet away from Papa. He sighed, and I heard Ol’ Ma release a short murmur, wrapped in a prayer. The rebels turned around and as quickly as they’d come, they disappeared into the sugarcane field toward the sound of the drums.
When we could no longer hear them, almost at once everyone started to run. Papa held my hand, dragging me. I lost my breath in the rainy season puddles, sobbed into the backs of those drums until I was blinded by the tears, and fear, so crippling that I was not sure if this was a bad dream that Torma or Korkor would eventually wake me up from. Every few steps I could feel the sharp end of a stone tear through my slippers, and I thought of Mam. If she knew what would happen here. If she knew that we were running. And as if I had been pinched, too hard to keep from crying, I realized that I would not be home that Sunday when Mam called. The phone would ring and still ring and we would not answer to tell her about the drums. Or that we had been running but we had been good. That the rebels almost asked Papa where he worked but they ran away first, and I saw Papa’s eyes go back to the time Mam got on that plane, dark, as if he was struggling to see something too far ahead.
When Papa said we were close to the ETMI where we would rest, and far enough from the rebels, he let us slow down. We walked until we could see the sun at the end of the road. We traveled toward it, taking turns sitting on Papa and Ol’ Ma’s hips.
“I want to go home,” K whined.
“Soon, soon,” Papa said. In the evening as we approached the ETMI, the crowd began to move slower in front of us.
“We here,” Brother James said. A sign on the gate read: Elizabeth Tubman Memorial Institute. When the people walking in front of us scattered and our view of the institute was clear, Papa squeezed my hand in his.
“Ay God,” Ma said with her hand over her heart.
Before us, seated on the courtyard of the ETMI and spilling out of the building behind it, to the side of it on the tennis court and soccer field, and behind it, was what looked like everybody in the country. Everybody in Liberia, all the people in one place, on that field, away from the forest.
“Eight thousand and counting,” Brother James said.
“Oh God,” Ma said again.
Men and older boys stood together on the edge of the courtyard in conversations as deep and with faces as long as