The rocks and stones in the forest are plenty, but none will make a sound when they are stepped on. And the skeletons in the forest are plenty, but none will break to make a sound when they are stepped on. And the crocodiles in forest swamps, they fuss plenty and snap and tease, but not even they make sounds when they are stepped on. They just swim deeper. They hide.
When a prince entered the forest, the monkeys were already silent. There were two then—Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson—and Johnson was the prince who entered first to kill Hawa Undu and restore Liberia. Johnson stepped on the plenty rocks and stones, stepped on the skulls and crocodiles and none made a sound. On September 9, 1990, the wind stood still among the leaves and a prince finally captured the dragon. Hawa Undu clawed and howled but his fire had left him. The prince did not want to kill the dragon in the forest, because he believed the forest would one day be his, so he dragged Hawa Undu to his own house by his tail while the dragon’s teeth clapped, and he tied him with ropes made of shaven tree bark. The prince ripped off Hawa Undu’s scales, one by one, while he begged for mercy. The prince’s rebels surrounded Hawa Undu, spat on him, mocked him, made him howl, and praised the prince for fulfilling the promise he made of finally killing the dragon and ending this war.
The prince told them to beat Hawa Undu, and the rebels took their fists and clubs and beat Hawa Undu. He told them to cut his hands, which were guilty of stealing from the Liberian people, and the rebels cut his hands, one finger at a time. The prince told them to cut his ears because he did not listen when they told him to surrender on his own, and the rebels cut his ears. Hawa Undu would have at least tried to run away but they cut his toes, laughing while the ice from American beers chilled their throats. The rainy season was nearly gone so no thunder would drown out the sound of Hawa Undu dying. The powerful dragon who flew into a wall he denied was in front of him. Once a prince like his captor.
The prince dragged Hawa Undu’s lifeless body through Monrovia’s streets and left it there, bleeding from every opening. They said Liberia would be healed of her sickness after Doe was gone, that they had the pepper soup we needed. But these men who said they came to save Liberia, these men who say they come to save the world, they do not understand the curse of the forest. Those dreams of peace and noble rulers, they are gone. The trips to the market, the walks to the well, now ghosts among us. Those days of sweetness burned to ashes. Hawa Undu will never die. His spirit lives on, moves through the greed of those wretched heroes, all once princes, all once well-intentioned men.
By December 1990 the fighting had still not ended. The men in the village listened to a voice from the BBC on a rusty radio placed on a window’s edge, and the latest was that Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson were now fighting each other for the presidential seat after Hawa Undu’s death.
In Lai, we were not allowed to walk inside the chicken coop. It was more Papa’s rule than any of the villagers’ rule. Because Papa said this, we played around it. We opened the main trapdoor and waited for stray chickens and their babies to run out of their tin shack so that we could chase them. We hid outside the coop. Ajala pressed her finger to her lips and grabbed the edge of the shack door. We covered our mouths to keep from laughing. Ajala flung the door open and several chickens ran out, leaving tiny tiny footprints in the dirt. The young boys of the group scrambled to throw the chickens back into the coop.
“Look!” K said, pointing to the door where the orange chicken slowly came out. As it turned around to make its way back into the coop, Ajala shut the trapdoor, and the boys threw the remainder of the loose chickens through the window.
“Pah, y nahla!” Ajala shouted, pointing at a lone chicken. As if the chicken understood what Ajala said, it ran around the side of the shack. We followed, laughing as it managed to escape our clapping hands and waddled between our legs. We laughed as it led us around the coop twice, then through the cooking house, where the women sat over boiling pots of rice and stew. The chicken led us through the rice farm between the yellow stalks, where the farmers yelled at us to take the chicken back to the coop.
In the distance I heard a woman yell. When we heard that more than two women were yelling now, and saw in the distance some elders run toward their houses from the village circle, we stopped. The chicken clucked loudly and I searched the crowd of children for my sisters. Wi took our hands and we ran to Papa’s house, where we were told to go at once if we suspected that anything was wrong. Villagers continued to run into their houses, and a crowd of men approached the opening to Piso, where a woman wore a camouflage vest and dragged a bottle of palm oil to the edge of the village circle. A gun hung on her shoulder, like the one the rebels carried on the road.
“They found us!” a villager shouted as she ran into her house, slamming the door. “I didn’t come to start trouble,” the stranger said to the crowd of men. “I’m looking for Gus Moore. Augustus Moore.” Papa ran out of his house into the circle.
“Go into the house and close the door,” he said to Wi.
Wi, like me, was unable to leave him, and after only a few steps she stopped and looked at the soldier woman from a distance.
“What is the problem here?!” Papa asked as he moved through the crowd of men and stopped when he saw the shiny gun on the woman’s back.
“I’m looking for Augustus Moore. That’s you?” she asked calmly.
“Yeh,” Papa said. “What you doing here? How did you find us?!”
“I’ve come for you,” she said, spitting on the ground in front of him. “You and your daughters.”
“What do you mean you come for me?” he asked, raising his voice. “Who sent you?!” He sounded afraid, he thought he was shouting.
“Mam. Your wife,” the rebel said and watched Papa’s face change. He stood noiselessly. “Your wife come for you.”