The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 46
Cars honked around us, and every so often a black SUV raced ahead of the stagnant rows of cars. Some had portable flashing sirens on their hoods, some were followed or preceded by a few cars or pen-pens, and they created third or fourth lanes into oncoming traffic. The cars in the opposite lanes stopped or drove to the edge of the road, making room for the unvarying black vehicles and the men they carried.
“Are those cops?” I asked Papa, and he laughed.
“No. They’re mostly politicians.”
“Do you know any?” I asked, making a mental note to peer through the windows for what these men looked like.
“A few. But many of them didn’t live in Monrovia when we were coming up.”
I envisioned the men in those cars who were once children upcountry in ignored villages—their families unable or uninspired to make the trip to Monrovia for lack of resources, of opportunity, of housing, of connections. Then after the 1980 coup, culminating with Liberia’s wars, these families, many disregarded by the monopoly of power that existed in the city walls before then, moved en masse to live within Monrovia’s borders, changing the face and shape of the city, reconstructing its body, an incurable metamorphosis. And these children grew up to buy the cars and the house staff and the girls, just like the men their fathers and grandfathers had once criticized. Tailored suits and bow ties. Security men and rubber farms. Gated homes and lawns too expansive for the children their wives let them claim as their own. I recalled the pictures I once saw of those first settlers in Monrovia from America, who wore top hats and three-piece suits during the dry season, on days that could not have been less than ninety degrees. But they had made it to a land, made it back home to the continent, free now with a country all their own. And they built the houses and the farms and the government, built the churches and the schools and the clinics, and they bought the clothes like the men their fathers and grandfathers had criticized. They say the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house. And alas, those at the soundless core of Liberia, then as well as now, tired of attempting to overthrow their rulers, use their master’s tools to build houses of their own. To build cities of their own. And how? How does one model a nonpareil freedom with the master’s tools, the same used to mold the institutions that kept them in chains? Pyrrhic victories.
An eager crowd ran toward an already overflowing taxi. One woman managed to squeeze in and the taxi faded out to a dirt road between two corner market sellers. Papa finally turned from the main road.
“Does this look familiar?” he asked when we arrived at a house with a tin roof and a full clothesline along the side of the structure. The green paint was chipped across the surface and half of the cement of the front porch was missing.
“What is this?” I asked, squinting at the overgrown bushes in the front yard.
“It’s Caldwell.”
The house, now small and unfamiliar, stood ruined, like an estranged friend, a friend who’d wronged me and still was anxious for me to make the first move. Mam’s garden was gone, and the roof had been replaced with sheets of zinc. The once-paved roads of the neighborhood had been reduced to dirt and rocks—the road to the neighboring houses unrecognizable. Iguanas and lizards clambered over the outlying bushes and palm trees.
“Wow,” I said, my voice cracking, and opened the car door.
“No,” Papa said, almost shouting.
“Why? I want to ask to go inside.”
“No. That somebody else house now.”
“Wait, what? They’re squatters. You own that house,” I said closing the door.
A woman appeared on the porch wearing a lappa tied tightly to her waist, a child tied to her back.
“Let them have it. There is nothing in there for me. Not anymore.”
After the port, after the game of dodging potholes, careful not to scrape the edges, as if each were a wide-open gate to the bellies of hell, we reached Vai Town. And half a mile beyond the port, before a gas station, there is a road once paved, now hunched and imploded, with shacks born of war on either side. I grew eager to reach the end of that road. I could not wait to see her.
“They won’t win!” a man shouted, pointing to a television, crowded at the feet by young boys avoiding schoolwork or selling water packs in traffic to add to their family incomes.
“You a damn fool. You see they up like that you say they will not win? You think it easy thing, scoring in soccer?”
And beyond the salt of those words there was more road, more children playing, unaware of how those plum trees bloomed in NormalDay. And beyond those children, at the end of that Logan Town road, there sat a house underneath a plum tree, and an old woman on the porch. Frail she was, her full head covered, her neck almost gliding with the wind to turn her face toward the various subjects, as if they were all a part of her kingdom, as if they orbited around that house.
Before the car even stopped, I was undone with tears. I had been away for so long—in that new country—and how could I know she was waiting? Her wrinkles told time, told stories. Her corneas were rimmed with gray. I exited the car and she squinted, concerned.
“Ol’ Ma,” I said and stumbled up the porch steps. She still glared sternly at me, a stranger yet her kin.
“Ol’ Ma,” I said again. I touched her hands, my neck a canvas of tears, and they were still warm, still soft.
She looked at