AS I LOOKED DOWN FROM MY FLIGHT onto the dense green rain forest that surrounds Robertsfield airport, all I could see was bush. From the air, Liberia looked lush and completely uninhabited. Fierce waves from the Atlantic hurled at the shoreline.
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Illustration by Laura Carlin. Photographs from Helene Cooper.
During my growing-up years in Liberia in the 1970s, I had made the descent to Robertsfield more than a dozen times, usually when returning home from summer vacations. I sat so close to the plane window that it clouded from my breath. I would look down for the landmarks that told me I was home: the rubber trees at Firestone, the squat, red-clay-tinged whitewash buildings of Schieffelin, the three-headed palm tree near our house at Sugar Beach. I would strain and squint to try to see the two mansions that made up the Cooper family compound at Sugar Beach.
Now, three decades later, I certainly couldn’t see what remained of our house. From the air, it was all bush and sea, like a set for some movie of Africa 100 years ago. My hands clenched into fists. For 23 years I hid in America, remaking myself into a nondescript black American woman. I polished up my American accent so that I sounded as if I were from New York. I dumped my Liberian passport, got a job as a journalist, covered the Florida presidential recount and the Sept. 11 attacks and even embedded with the Third Infantry Division to cover my country’s invasion of Iraq. And with each new accouterment of my ever-evolving image, I further shed Liberia.
Until now.
I was going back, finally doing something I should have done a thousand different times since that night, May 16, 1980, when my mother, my younger sister, Marlene, and I got on a Pan Am flight at Robertsfield and fled the place that my great-great-great-great-grandfather helped found.
The memory of that night is still very clear: how we sloshed through rain puddles as we ran across the tarmac to the plane. How we sat in the artificially perfumed cabin of the DC-10, strapped to our seats, fearfully eyeing everyone who boarded after us, terrified that the soldiers would come and pull us off the plane. How I pressed my face to the window as we took off, imagining I could still see Eunice where we had left her in the Robertsfield terminal.
Robertsfield came into view as the plane made its approach. Finally, I could see a few meager signs of civilization. Zinc rooftops. Corrugated shacks. Fittingly, it was raining, and I could almost hear the tink, tink beating on the zinc. My stomach clenched as we touched down.
I should have done this a long time ago.
Every time I got on a plane to fly to Geneva to cover trade talks as a journalist, or boarded a flight to London to visit friends for the weekend, or organized trips for myself up the Amazon River in Brazil, I should have instead been coming here, home, to Liberia.
I should have been coming home, to Liberia, to find Eunice.
Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/magazine/06Liberian-t.html
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