Revolution

The revolution woke me up. The rat-a-tat of machine gun fire seeped into my dreams like drops of ink on paper; spread up into my subconscious, became diluted and blurred. I lay there in the dark, watching the gray light stretch the room into shape around me. First it made only shadows; the bodies of sleeping girls on the floor; the vague outline of Astrid’s white armoire, white bed, and the mirror that hung from the back of her door. Then, slowly, the light grew stronger and gave me details; Beatta’s hair slung across her face and her Holly Hobby pillow, the pile of backpacks in the corner, Barbie dolls littering the floor around us, pillows and blankets and fuzzy slippers strewn around like fallen leaves.

We’d come to Astrid’s house yesterday afternoon after school. We’d eaten pizza and birthday cake for dinner, watched Astrid blow out the ten candles on her cake, and we’d stayed up late, playing Barbie dolls and giggling until finally her parents had insisted for the final time that we stay quiet and Go! To! Sleep!

I was surprised when Astrid’s mother crept into Astrid’s room and shook Astrid’s shoulder. As she picked her way over the sleeping figures to make her way out of the room she paused when she saw my open eyes. She waved to me as she left the room, an afterthought, and Astrid and I stumbled after her, tripping on the hems of our nightgowns, confused and silent, careful not to wake the others.

Astrid’s mother led us down the darkened hallway and into the kitchen. All the shutters were closed and the shades drawn. Through the shadows, I saw Astrid’s father hunkered over the table, the radio pressed against his ear. He glanced up at us but he seemed not to see us standing before him. Astrid’s mother said, “There’s been a coup d’etat.” I didn’t know what that meant, but the strain in her voice was obvious, and so was that not-so-distant popping outside. The radio hummed, and I could hear a voice coming through it, thick and jubilant, “In the CAUSE of the PEOPLE the STRUGGLE continues!”

None of our parents came to pick any of us up that day. We girls, all foreigners in Liberia whose parent’s were diplomats, development workers, or business people, absorbed the fear emanating from Astrid’s parents. It subdued us. Astrid’s father was Liberian, and wealthy. Not a member of the government, but a part of the elite. The home they lived in, the one sheltering all of us, was owned by President Tolbert. A president who, just that very morning—April 12, 1980—under cover of darkness, was turned on by his own guards, shot in his sleep, and dismembered. Later, we’d hear that his tortured body was spread like raw meat in front of the JFK Hospital as a symbol of the old guard falling. In the cause of the people, the revolution began with gunshots and blood.

We stayed trapped in Astrid’s house for two days. Fear was a constant, a member of the party. It lurked around every corner. If there was even a moment that we forgot, for an instant, our situation, fear leapt in and spilled down our spines again. Astrid’s father was silent the entire time. He kept that radio clutched in his hands and now and again would fiddle with the dials. As if changing the station would reveal that all this was just a bad dream. The sound of machine gun fire was continual. Rat-tat-tat. I don’t remember the moment I realized just what it was—not fireworks after all—but at some point I did understand.

Astrid’s mother, a willowy blond Norwegian, vacillated. One moment she’d round us all up for a session of doing one another’s hair, rooting through her stash of make-up and pretending we were beauty queens, and then she’d fall suddenly silent. She cried only once, I saw her through the cracked open bathroom door when she thought she was alone. She leaned over the sink and rubbed her long hair over her face and when she looked up I caught her reflection in the mirror, red-rimmed eyes and tear stained cheeks.

What could she have thought? There were no telephones in Monrovia in the early eighties. There was no connection to the outside world apart from the radio. There was no way for her to know if the parents of all the girls in her care were ok, or when they might get through to pick us up. There was no way for her to know when she’d run out of food to feed us, things to entertain us, ways to keep us from searching out the windows for stolen, dangerous views of what was happening. There was no way to know that her home wouldn’t be over-run at any moment by armed soldiers.

We girls speculated in the way that ten-year old girls do, dramatic and emotional. One child began sobbing and cried that she “knew, just knew” that she’d never see her parents or baby sister again. Astrid’s mother shuffled her down the hall to the study and later, when the girl came back to play with us, she had the calm air of having been all sobbed out. Rung down to the core, like a firmly squeezed sponge.

On the third morning of waking to the sound of gunshots, I didn’t even bother getting dressed. I remember sitting at the breakfast table, eating cereal, when there was a loud knocking on the door. Astrid’s father opened it slowly, there was no peephole; no way to ensure it wasn’t armed soldiers come to re-posses the dead president’s real estate. I knew that, and as I heard the door open the spoon fell from my hands with a milky clatter. I didn’t know how terrified I was until I felt the cold spoon in my lap. Instead of soldiers, I looked up and saw my father standing there. His face was stone and all he said was, “Get dressed, grab your stuff. If you can’t find it, leave it here!” Astrid’s mother appeared with my jeans in one hand and my book bag in the other. “Where’s my shirt? It’s my favorite.” I asked, “Don’t bother with that, ” my father yelled, “Just put your jeans on over you nightgown and move it!”

I was scared to leave Astrid’s house, the sharp light of day was like a knife that cut at me. I was a small creature captured and pulled from her subterranean hole, sunlight poking at her eyes, used to dark. The car, a low and shiny official US embassy vehicle with a Liberian driver and diplomatic license plates, sat no more than ten feet from the door. In seconds, my dad had snapped me into the seat, slamming the door tightly behind him, and we drove across the deserted city, back to our house.

The Liberian military was ostensibly in charge of the new government, and soldiers roamed the streets for days looking for escaped members of the former regime. Mostly the new government was welcomed. The old Tolbert government was seen as being anachronistic. They were the tiny percentage of descendants of freed American slaves, sent back to Liberia—America’s one semblance of a colony in Africa—under president Monroe. The freed slaves had immediately taken control of the nation, set up a government in their image of the one they’d left behind, built an infrastructure of old southern-style mansions, and set to consolidating power in their rule over the indigenous people. They held power jealously. This coup, led by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe, marked the end of that era.

There was a strict curfew kept—dusk to dawn nobody was to be outside on penalty of death. Our International School was closed, but dad began going back to the office during the day. For a couple of weeks things seemed calm. A routine developed. Then, on April 22, 1980, thirteen members of the old ruling party, several of whom were fathers of Liberian students in our school, were sentenced to death. The executions were televised, and took place on our beach, just meters from where our white house stood, up on its high concrete pillars looking far away out over the sea. In early morning darkness they were woken from their sleep. They were made to peel off their own shirts, they were tied with green plastic rope to posts whittled out of thick tree branches. The snap of the bullets that killed them sounded distant, sliding above the sound of the tide coming in. Our fear had leapt in us, a flame breathed back to life, and we sat huddled in the half-light of our hallway, reading books to each other by the light of a flashlight, and forcing our imaginations to take us far, far away from here.

We were evacuated a few days later. It wasn’t dramatic, no helicopters hovered up above the roof of our house, no broadly smiling American military, like in the movies. Our evacuation was just a set of orders sent via cable from the State Department in Washington announcing that dependants should leave the country as soon as they could. My father came home from work early one day and told my mother the news. Family member of embassy employees were being told to go. My father, though, would have to stay behind—a symbolic presence assuring the new Liberian government that the US would continue relations. We packed up one suitcase each, and before we could even say goodbye to our friends, we were sipping orange juice and watching movies on the Pan Am flight to New York. The plane just a shimmering silver glint in the sky, high above Monrovia.

We woke up from our jet lag, rubbed our eyes and our beach was gone, replaced with clean, gray sidewalks. The palm trees morphed into elms, and the sweaty salt air and clear blue skies were suddenly a rainy Washington spring, the sky cloudy and thick. It was too fast. There was no transition, there was no preparation, no way to talk ourselves down from the place that our fear had put us for those last bullet-riddled weeks in Monrovia. There was no one on this other side who could understand what it had felt like to be frightened, to have bullets be the background sound. There was no one who knew that I woke up at night, panicked and sweaty, fear for my father, ripping at my heart, making it beat wildly so it leapt in my throat, and left me gasping for breath. There was no one who could whisper to me that they thought they still heard bullets too! In every slamming door, in every sudden shout, in every car that happened to backfire, there was a rush of adrenaline, a shock in my blood that made me want to duck, run for cover and hide in the dark.

When we returned to Monrovia four months later. The government had stabilized. For us foreigners, little had changed. We had lost nothing of importance. Our houses still stood, air-conditioned and calm, our parents were still alive and safe. Our impermanence was our gift, our luck. I could read that message like it was written in the newspaper. We all could. We’d only been watching, like a show on television. I didn’t want to be the one taking up ownership of a pain that rightfully belonged to children who deserved it—the Liberian kids who hadn’t been able to escape. I kept my losses tucked away in a secret cloudy place, but I listed them in my mind; I had lost my favorite shirt, my last two months of fourth grade, my dad for nine long weeks, and my feeling that the world was safe.

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