Helene Cooper tells us pre-revolutionary Liberian society rivaled Victorian England when it came to matters of social correctness, as she describes a privileged 1970’s childhood at her family’s main residence in Liberia, a twenty-two room behemoth over-looking the Atlantic, called Sugar Beach. Cooper is a direct descendant of the freed American slaves whom sailed from New York to Monrovia in 1820. Unwelcome in both the United States and Africa, these free men of color founded Liberia with blood, sweat and firearms. After the free men subjugated the indigenous tribes, they installed themselves as the ruling class, their new tribe called ‘the Congo’, until two brutal revolutions destroyed Liberia one hundred and fifty years later. ***Helene Cooper's “The House at Sugar Beach: in search of a lost African childhood” Simon & Schuster. 2008. Cooper’s mother takes in a local impoverished girl, Eunice, from the Bassa tribe as a foster daughter. Fostering was a common idea for Liberia’s elite ruling class. At first we see Eunice habitually running away—Eunice’s Bassa mother dutifully marching her back to the Congo Coopers, knowing Eunice can only move out of poverty by living at Sugar Beach. Eunice becomes a sort of doppelganger to Cooper, passim: what if Cooper had instead been born into a lower class? Imported luxury sedans, boarding schools, and the haute couture of Cooper’s 1970s adolescence are niceties the reader knows will eventually evaporate when the notorious civil wars of Liberia hit in the 1980s. The nauseating brutality of these civil wars is lapping at the shores of idyllic Sugar Beach like the impending tide. A Marxist-spewing sergeant in the national forces, Samuel Doe, seizes the government, and seemingly without much effort. Doe’s belligerent revolutionary soldiers show up at the reclusive Sugar Beach. Drunk on retribution and cane juice, the soldiers rape Cooper’s mother in the basement, while Cooper and her sisters hide in a locked bedroom. The marauding soldiers had wanted to have their way with the young daughters, we’re told, but Mother Cooper is somehow able to negotiate an agreement with the soldiers, offering herself instead. Shortly after the rape, Cooper, her mother and sister briskly gather what resources they can, pack two suitcases each, bribe the thugs occupying the Monrovia airport, and move across the Atlantic to Tennessee, leaving behind Cooper’s foster-sister, Eunice, to fend for herself in disintegrating Liberia. America, a former vacation spot for the Coopers, loses luster when it becomes a place to eek-out a living. A still proud Mother Cooper explains to young Helene their status in America after watching network news dispatches about refugees fleeing the chaos in Liberia, “no we are not refugees, refugees don’t buy their own plane tickets.†Both mother and father eventually return to Liberia, in an attempt to reclaim the decency and respectability their lives once had. Cooper however, the resilient bookish and effervescent child she is, prospers and assimilates into American society, where she discovers an intense interest in journalism at the University of North Carolina. Cooper by this time has passed into American culture seamlessly, never again speaking in her Liberian English. She parlays herself into a reporter’s job at The Wall Street Journal and eventually The New York Times. As Cooper reports from Bosnia and Iraq, she monitors headlines of Liberia’s descent into the macabre madness of Charles Taylor. Eunice, Cooper’s low-birthed foster sister, is enmeshed in the reality of Charles Taylor’s Liberia: pre-pubescent soldiers stumble through the streets of Monrovia in a combined haze of cocaine, alcohol and general stupor—the intoxicated kids garishly wearing wedding gowns and brightly-colored wigs as they shoot to kill in patternless Kalashnikov street battles. But Cooper, now a seasoned journalist, does not linger on the grotesque of Charles Taylor’s rule, and perhaps because she knows lingering on gory details will only make an abstraction of those people suffering in Africa, or perhaps because, she is by birth, one of those people. Decades after leaving, Cooper returns to Liberia where she finds Eunice—an incredibly touching scene. ** Pete Willows is a freelance writer who has lived and worked in Egypt, The United States, New Zealand, the Sudan and Canada. BM
