EXCERPTS (creative non-fiction flowing into fiction) from,

One Small Long Death

The hearts of the palm trees had been eaten. This was a serious taboo against tradition, for to split the tree and extract the heart killed the tree forever.

Too many trees had been felled in the rainforests, gouged from the navel of the land. Ships came not for human cargo but for iron ore, rubber, gold, timber, and diamonds, and terror and torture were the instruments of control used against defenseless villagers, forced to mine, haul and dig to satisfy the crude and callous hungering for the wealth Liberia held. It was a time of tragedies and aberrations; even the heavens were no longer immune to human interference in their celestial affairs.

Monrovia was a city of mercenary violence, eight years without electricity and pipe borne water. She lay on her side along the Gulf of Guinea's curving coast, facing the Atlantic sea through the stumps of rotting palms and bare coconut trees.

A woman's torso floated by on the rhythmic waves. It had to be a woman's body, wrapped like that in a colorful, print cloth. But it was not a lappa covering what was left of her. She had been thrown naked, belly split open with a knife, body hacked to pieces, into the sea. What was left of her was a feast for crabs and other scavengers of the sea, covering her like a bristling burial cloth. She may have been one of those infamous Leopard Women known to fight her murderer to the very end.

Leopard Women sang out, preparing to fight back:

Women, do something!
Don't just sit there!
Do something!
Women! Do something!

They fought back and they suffered for their defiance. They were targeted to taste the worst brutalities. Unborn babies whose first breaths were death screams were slashed out of their wombs. But stories passed from mouth to mouth, exploits of the Leopard Women surrounding a lone enemy on his way to pillage, murder and brutality!

The women disrobed and rubbed their naked buttocks up against him from all sides, ululating their utter disrespect for his very existence, that a creature such as himself dared to masquerade as a human being. They repudiated him with a woman's most profane curse, mocking his manhood by jeering at his privates and exposing their own genitals through which humanity is birthed. He was urinated on and smeared with menstrual blood. No man ever recovered from the shame.

Monrovia panted, bore down and strained out a sorrowful sea song, croaking for help from an indifferent world. Her dainty undergarments were bloodied and exposed. Her bruised inhabitants outnumbered the healthy. Those from the rural lands came starving, empty-handed, limping and crawling into her arms. Some reached her boundary with shaved heads and mourning chalk painting their bodies, and fell thrashing about in the dust and debris.

The women's keening cries were answered by the men's gnashing teeth. The women pounded the earth openhanded, tearing their flesh on shards of glass, shrapnel and sharp pieces of rock and concrete blasted apart by the bomb and missile explosions.

The women shrieked for the living and the dead in ritual, vibrating tongues; for their children ripped from their arms and taken away for some psychopath's sexual pleasure; for their children carried off to die alone blown up by land mines in fields that should have been under cultivation; for their children drugged and taught to kill without remorse or fear.

Somehow Monrovia stretched herself and swallowed their psychological traumas, parasitic infections, and hemorrhaging wounds. She was the only place of refuge inside the borders of the country from the frenzied slaughter they called civil war. She was the trophy to be possessed by the final victor, one of those nine blood-soaked warlords in the bush fighting for power. She had been taken, lost, retaken, and now Monrovia grieved under military curfew.

Foreign soldiers in full military uniform and leather-rimmed berets patrolled the streets with UZI's, AK-47s, anti-aircraft launchers and hand grenades. Seduced by their masculine air of invincible confidence, the most beautiful young women contested and fussed among themselves to cook for them, unaware that forewarned by their wives and mothers at home, the men used strong antidotes against the love powders sprinkled by the handful in the simmering pots. The soldiers freely provided semen and food but not their vows.

These peacekeeping forces from Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Senegal, Burkina Faso and La Cote d'Ivoire removed the pyramids of decomposing bodies from the streets, buried the unclaimed bodies overflowing the morgue, brought in foreign exchange, and just when the people decided to crawl out of their crowded, stinking holes, staggering like poison drunk cockroaches in full sunlight, the peacekeepers methodically set about taking whatever the bombs and missiles, warlords and vandals left behind.

It was a brief, and cruel, euphoria. The peacekeepers held the unarmed city's peace, protected the powerless, evicted the once powerful, and moved into homes of their choosing after they lifted wiring, pipes, sinks, toilets, tiles, cabinets, tubs, glass panes, fuses, roofs, doors, anything movable and reusable, and sent all of it back to their homes on those same ships steered by phantom generals and bound for ports far outside Africa's territorial waters. Those ships flying Liberia's maritime flag under shadow ownership sailed on to an avaricious world mentally afflicted with addictive cravings for gleaming things.

A new era in the history of the nation was in ascendancy. Words like Pan Africanism, social transformation, the masses, revolution, bourgeoisie, hegemony and oligarchy ricocheted like lightening strikes that scorched the ears of the illiterate majority. In the mouths of their children, these words took on an incandescent power. The people could not pronounce these revolutionary phrases, but they could chronicle injustices, taxes, deep hurts, arrogance and bitter humiliations. They saw the well-fed children of the rich chauffeured in fancy, air-conditioned cars while their own children walked to and from the ghettos and slums in the broiling sun. Their children slept with growling stomachs, agonizing over school fees, while the wealthy squandered treasures held in their hands. And so initially the poor people rejoiced, and it was not the first time under the new dispensation that their exaltations metamorphosed into wind-blown ashes.

New customs became common in the land. Psychotics and human flesh-eaters became the new aristocrats. South African Boers, modern-day buccaneers and mercenaries came from across the earth like stalking vultures attracted to dying carrion. The land was mapped, measured and probed from air and sea.

The First Republic was dead.

Night fell with a strange quality. The dying screams of ancient hardwood trees echoed in the mournful winds. Ominous, massed clouds snuffed out the bright stars and smothered a weak moon. The clouds hung low, scowling over Monrovia.

The dream approaching the girl was a separate creature. It reached for the girl, whose small body was rolled up tight in the fetal position on her sleeping mat inside THE CHILDREN'S CHRISTIAN REFUGE HOME.

The dream did not come with an angry war cry, but instead with the kind of deliberate stealth an experienced predator chooses to stalk prey. It would shock her nervous system, leaving damage she would find no name for in any language she would ever know.

The dream did not originate inside her head, as those occasional bad dreams did before even her awake time became another kind of incoherency. It came to her, for her, on certain nights like this one, as soon as sleep came heavy over her, when all her childish attempts to stay awake were finally exhausted.

She did not remember, or if she did, the memories were only ghostly imprints disconnected from her day to day realities. Holy blue mountains under purple skies had blessed her footsteps. The stars had sung for her a sea breeze song about the rolling waters she‘d never seen. Birds of dazzling beauty perched on her head and sung the wisdom secrets of Goddesses. She had touched the moon and drank the waters of the sun. Pure rain had bathed her. Fire had kissed her skin. She no longer remembered those hours of spiritual fulfillment.

She sometimes pressed her thumbs directly above her eyelids to hold her eyes open and keep herself awake. Her bitten down, flattened thumbnails showed signs of anemia, flecked with the white crescent moon markings of vitamin deficiencies.

Sometimes she wrapped her thin, ashy arms around her upper body and gently rocked from side to side, singing in low, off key tones one of the new songs the teachers taught them about the love of Jesus for little children. Songs in her mother tongue she had been taught by her grandmother to tame the night and banish evil sprits brought no relief.

She knew all the words to the new songs, though the melody was not yet hers.

Jesus loves the little chiiil-dren,
all the children of the woooorld.
Red and yellow, black and white!
They are precious in his sight!
Jesus loves the little children of the woooorld.

Jesus in shining, diamond white robes with outstretched arms. Jesus smiled from the pages in the children's Bible book, all the happy children sitting on Jesus' lap and at his feet, leaning on Jesus' shoulders, resting their chubby, red cheeks against the golden head of Jesus.

There were no mismatched dressed children with haunted, craving sad eyes anywhere in the Jesus books. There were no yellow, red, or black children like herself (now that she'd learned in school she was Black African and Liberian), and yet she yearned to place herself inside that picture with Jesus the Savior and protector of girls and boys. She wondered what the red and yellow children looked like, how they lived, if they also fought evil shadows inside their dreams.

Jesus the Son of God, a dazzling white halo cradling his head. Jesus, with flat, long, yellow hair and calm sky blue eyes. Elusive blue eyes that never held her own needy, brown eyes, her feverishly hot, heart hungry brown eyes (her eyes when no one was looking or paying attention), no matter how she stared or shifted her position to gaze directly into his. Jesus, who always seemed to look past over her shoulder, or somewhere just above her head.

She conjured up Jesus now, his image blurring to become her grandmother's sweet, open face, her grandmother's veined hands feeding her with scooped fingers, her grandmother's fleshy lips blowing on hot food until it was just the right temperature for her impatient baby mouth, her grandmother's watery brown eyes, river mud brown eyes growing wider, wild, and then at last spilling infinite heart pains. Her grandmother's eyes changing into deep black holes boring into hers. Her grandmother's eyes speaking to her before a rebel—or soldier—one, struck her hard in the neck with a machete and she fell over, blood pouring from her ears. Her grandmother clutching her to her soft, withered breasts she had sucked and stroked even after their milk dried. Soaked in her grandmother's draining blood, she learned the absolute precision of that kind of terror which scars the soul forever.

Her father and two mothers were tied and stuck with broomsticks, impaled; her father behind, her mothers, in front, down there. The guttural, rattling death breaths of her clan dying all around her poured into her head and emptied all other sounds. Raucous laughter of the men dressed to resemble vengeful ancestral sprits, the unintelligible, harsh commands, the cries of goats being slaughtered, chimpanzees shrieking in the Bombax trees, the strangled chicken, stampeding cows.

What they did to her before they dragged her away tore the connective sieve between her conscious mind and flesh. When they reached the holy pool of catfish, in whose body the spirits of her ancestors lived on the excrement of the elders for continuity, the men speared and roasted the huge, whiskered fish that since time began were revered and cared for by her people. The men force-fed her the smoking, hot flesh.

Everything that happened between then and now she buried in her private mental prison. Memory was ammunition before the sun awoke. All of her days followed three dimensions: school, work, and church. These days she memorized and chanted what she memorized by rote. She was asked questions; she whispered yes, or nodded. Her mind was probed; she said what she believed was naturally expected. Her downcast eyes were humble and submissive.

She learned not to wince, complain, recoil or cry. She became a wooden doll. She never asked for anything and she received just what was offered or freely given. She knew that was hers could easily be taken. She avoided mental torment and physical torture by holding on to nothing.

She'd learned that other small bodies, like hers, could also contain cruel hearts. The hardened, the sullen, the brutal, the cunning, the ones toughened by killings who threatened to kill again, all found in her an easy target and willing accomplice to their desires. Whatever she had that they wanted, she gave without protest.

She rationalized, if her people hadn't tried to hide and protect themselves, if they hadn't kept the chickens, goats and cows, if they hadn't cursed and struggled when discovered, they might have survived. But they had moved deeper into the huge womb of the land, barricading themselves behind sharp stakes planted close together, driven deep in the earth, camouflaged with vines and leaves, only to be hunted down and trapped.

She was not unlike two lobes of kola from the same nut and tree; one whole and good, the other decaying. But after all she was a child, a small child of indeterminate age, because everyone with remembrance of her beginnings had been murdered or had vanished: snatched, like her small brothers and big sisters, from her life.

Soon her mind wanderings and vigil against the dream's intrusion ended. It would come only after her spirit yielded to weariness, and sleep pressed her down into a vulnerable state in a place inside herself where only she herself existed.

Other children covered with the scratchy, hot blankets, an undulating sea of gray froth the color of gutter scum, slept around her in the small crowded room. They were not allowed to sleep too close with limbs entwined. The consolation of skin to skin contact was forbidden for obvious reasons. This denial of touch, no arms to hold them, lift them up or carry them around, no relaxed bodies to lean against, reinforced in them a sense of their own, somehow polluted, low worth.

Inhaling each other's excretions, sweating, moaning, groaning, urinating, crying out or trembling in their sleep, some lay stiff, hands balled into fists, head borrowed under the suffocating donated covers manufactured faraway for prisoners in cold climates.

Burning, salty tears leaked. Behind their eyes, the dreams grew. Not blue-eyed Jesus smiling, arms wide open, yellow hair flowing, brilliant white robes. Not the Gods and Goddesses of their genealogies, now alien deities of forgotten names and unknown powers.

Hadn't they learned from some of the teachers that the great wickedness of the war arose out of the cruel, bloodthirsty religions of their uneducated, unchristian fathers and mothers? Those frightful things behind their eyes, so they believed, were grotesque hybrids grafted off these black abominations.

Work and lessons began soon after daybreak. They would pray in Jesus' name, learn A-B-C and 1-2-3, sweep and wash, sew and garden. They learned of apple trees and peach orchards, autumn and winter, scooters and cotton candy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Halloween.