The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 49
“Where did you go?” Papa asked, still looking at his book.
“To talk to Deek,” I said, trying to be casual, indiscernible.
“Why?” Papa asked and looked up at me, but spoke before I could respond. “Your Mom says you looking for that woman? Why?”
“I … I don’t know,” I admitted. “Curious, I guess.”
“Be careful,” he said. “You hear me?”
“Yeh,” I nodded aggressively. Those eyes of his, in that look he gave when he returned to the cavities of my dreams, and those months of running.
“The guns are still buried,” he said, his eyes, true, still undone, digging into mine.
His voice was softer than I expected; he sounded reserved, forgiving of my oblivion and uncertainty. Before I could begin, Mam walked into the bedroom where I sat conducting the interview, startling me.
“Who are you talking to?” she whispered, a beautiful head peeking through the door frame.
“Someone who may know about … Satta,” I answered quickly, then shook my hand and waved her away, mouthing that I’d tell her later. “You girl, you crazy? Don’t bring your American thing here,” I was sure she would say with a stern, chastising tone and lecture about my safety during the visit.
After an unsuccessful attempt at small talk that likely unmasked my fear of the conversation and his history, I divulged details about my search for Satta, almost whispering, in the same way I had shared with Agnes. When I spat out the last word, I felt dizzy, as if I were dreaming that conversation and the circumstances around it.
“I know of some like that,” he said after I spoke. “Even the worst of them, who were helping the people escape and cross the border.”
“Wait, what? Really?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Sometimes you know what they doing, you just turn your eye. Other times …”
It was an understood silence.
“I will help you,” he said with ease.
I was taken aback by his generosity and wanted immediately to talk to Agnes about what he owed her that was so valuable that he was so willing to help me. In my right mind I perhaps would have hurried off the phone, but the same curiosity that birthed my search formed other words for the general, questions he welcomed, like why, and at times in the conversation, it seemed, missed. I learned he’d become a Church of God pastor, although he had no congregation. Rather than preaching, he began a rehabilitation ministry for former rebels addicted to cocaine, dujee, and by-products of crack. In a process he called “dry detox” initiated in 2007, young boys were asked to sign a form forfeiting their basic human rights for full immersion in his program. They then spent three days in a dark cell with a meal a day of beans and milk.
“It is spiritual,” he said. “I want them to come out of the darkness physically, but I want them to come out spiritually too.” And had they? After emerging from the first three days, the boys were tortured by withdrawal tremors; if the boys still did not escape, they were bathed with cold water and the counseling began.
The young bodies of the prince’s soldiers danced in my memory—their invisible drums and the guns and lives they carried. Meanwhile, stories across the world went on. The general’s, and those stretched across vast plains and always resurrecting cities of the west, and mine. God had forgiven him, he said, and that was enough. He did not answer to man but to God and that familiar litany, the song the guilty play on repeat.
After hanging up the phone, I sat unmoved on the edge of the bed, in silence. I was not sure what my exact expectations of the conversation were, but as I sat there I wanted more.
The air-conditioning wall unit sputtered from the surges of an unreliable generator, my parents’ voices floated toward me in murmurs from the adjacent room, life moved about outside the window—laughing children, market women, students—and I sat in stillness.
Two days later the general called me with news that he did not find any woman who fought for his faction or others named Satta. Instead, he gave me contact information for two pastors who directed me to another woman named Agnes, each of whom said things very similar to the story I told them of Satta.
By now I had admitted to Mam what I had been up to, and after sucking her teeth at my foolishness, she then insisted my conversations were all to take place in her vicinity. I spoke to Agnes on a Tuesday afternoon, on a phone call in my parents’ living room.
“Hi, hello,” I said, smiling, looking at Mam, who sat on the living room sofa periodically glancing at the phone, as if it were the woman herself.
“Yeah, hello,” she answered.
A thirty-eight-year-old wife and mother of four from Kakata, Liberia, Agnes had fought with the general and INPFL. As a young teenager, she joined his faction, not by force like many other girls who fought during that time, but out of obligation to her family.
“I did not have support,” she said. “If I joined, I was promised protection and food for my family.”
She killed almost immediately, but out of fear for her life, she remained with the rebel army. “I helped who I could,” she said. During the war there were various checkpoints where rebels would line up civilians and ask where they were from and to which tribe they belonged. If the civilian or group was suspected to be from an opposing side, they were killed. To help civilian Liberians, Agnes and other women rebels, like Satta, made a habit of lying at checkpoints.
“They would ask the people where they were from and I would speak up and say they were my tribe or my family so the boys wouldn’t kill them,” she said.