My Family Away from Family: A Caribbean Woman in Liberia, West Africa

By: aromaproductions on 12:21 PM

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My Family Away from Family

 

My arrival in Liberia in December 1975 was due to friendships I had formed as a graduate student at Kent State University in Ohio, USA, starting in 1972.  

Fellow Virgin Islanders, already enrolled there, had introduced me to the Liberian student community.  Both groups were part of the African Students Union. Social activities and the semblance of a shared culture had solidified our bond.

It was not long after I had completed my MA, and enrolled in the doctoral program in the Department of English at Kent State University when I decided that I wanted to widen my horizons. 

I was just as eager to put the cold Ohio weather and the smallness of my Caribbean island home behind me. By that time, some of my Liberian friends had received their degrees and had returned home. 

           So, Liberia it was. Did Liberia choose me? It was there I met a fellow “West Indian” who I later married. And, what began as a simple adventure swiftly turned into a fundamental life lesson about family, motherhood, and the place that became our home.

The building of my Liberian household began with advice from the Dean of the Liberal Arts College at the University of Liberia. She had hired me to teach American Literature at the university starting in January 1976. 

 Upon being assigned a house in the Sinkor Old Road vicinity, she advocated that I hire a houseboy to do my cooking, washing, and cleaning. It had to be a houseboy. Women were unreliable due to child-bearing. A Dutch next-door neighbor, who was married to a Liberian, introduced me to a houseboy. Her endorsement of him as an excellent cook of European food was tempered with warnings of potential requests to go up-country due to unexpected deaths. They would be followed by his appeal for a salary advance.

“Big Boy,” who was actually, a tall, lean middle-aged man of Bassa ethnicity, a group from coastal Liberia, became the first houseboy I employed. And he lived up to my neighbor’s predictions. His meals were delectable but soon the day arrived when he asked for his first advance in salary. I was sitting in my sparse living room when Big Boy approached me, hat in hand.  I put down the papers I was correcting and looked up.

“Bad news, Missy!” “Me brother die oh.”

“Oh my God.” I shot up out of my seat. How?  When?”.

“Cholera, Missy. Last week.  Me sister bring de news from de interior just now. De family mus’ pay fifty dolla’ each to bury him.  I know I just start work but I begging you to advance me next month salary.”

“I see.” Thoughts flashed back to my Dutch neighbor. Suspicions circled my head.

“Missy, me sister outside.”

“Tell her to come in.” I did not know what to expect.

Big Boy returned with a thin woman dressed in black.  Tears flooded her cheeks as she approached me. She blabbered what I assumed was the sad news in dialect.  Unable to understand and bear the crying flood, I went to my bedroom and returned with the salary advance.

“Here’s the money,” I said.

“Thank you, Missy.”

“God bless,” the woman in black mumbled while wiping her face with her lappa.

“How long will you be gone?” I asked.

“Two weeks, Missy.

Big Boy returned three weeks later.

 My relationship with Big Boy would soon draw me further into unexpected monetary matters. Not long after his return, I was summoned to court by the local Bassa chief because of some unpaid debt Big Boy had accrued.

 As his employer, I was expected to back his expenditure.  I could not help but feel I was being bamboozled as I followed Big Boy through a labyrinth of houses. Finally, we reached one with a Liberia flag posted in front of it. When the case was over, I complained to the Dean of my college about my troubles, which, of course, was not the business of the university.  Sometime after that, Big Boy went to his hometown, up-country, and never returned.

             Shortly after I started teaching at the University of Liberia, I met my husband Emmanuel Mark, a pediatrician, who came from Grenada, West Indies. After completing high school in Liberia, Emmanuel attended Cuttington University in Bong County, Liberia, before moving on to Basel, Switzerland, to medical school. Just one year after his return to Liberia, a local friend, and fellow former grad student at Kent State University introduced me to him in January 1976.

We were both from the Caribbean, so it seemed a natural pairing, a kind of home away from home. He was happy to meet a fellow Caribbean, too, and proposed several months later. 

We got married in 1977. At the time, I had no family members present to give me guidance, so I heavily relied on my husband’s advice. I depended on his cook, Julia, as well. She was also a member of the Bassa ethnic group.

          His cook, Julia, became my main support and taught me how to hold, breastfeed, bathe, and mother our first child, Malaika, who was born in 1978. The dry-season, holiday break, equivalent to the long summer holidays in the USA, gave me an extended maternity leave. I breastfed my firstborn for six months and Julia looked after her when I returned to teaching full-time at university.

One generation earlier in the Caribbean islands, my parents, who worked full time, also benefitted from house help. Back then, these individuals, however, were adult members of our extended family or a friend of the family, who needed paid work. 

But once we became teenagers, such house helpers were no longer needed, and we were then responsible for looking after ourselves and cleaning up.

        

In Liberia, Julia would eventually become a reliable childcare helper to our three children even while raising her own.  Cassandra and Michael were born two and a half years apart. Julia became my advisor in all things local and a trusted member of our household. Being a mother of five children, she had plenty of experience. She carried my children tied securely on her back with her lappa, a custom of African women and mothers. 

It was common to see babies tied to their mothers’ backs while they worked, whether at the market or in the field.  Julia carried them on her back as she walked in our spacious garden or when she had to dash to her nearby home.

Julia was also my shopping companion. She accompanied me to the market where a miscellany of potent scents swamped our noses as we walked from stall to stall—palm oil, fermented fufu, milky palm wine, smoked meat, fish, crabs, black charcoal dust, fresh cut firewood, and tree bark. 

She pointed out the bitter leaves, palava sauce leaves, potatoes greens, cassava leaves, and other produce. We swatted away at flies that had converged to freely sample all the food. She taught me how to hustle for rice, onions, salt, and other commodities when they were scarce due to unrest. We were always stocking food.

            There was also the time Julia and I had to go come back. It was shortly after The Thomas Quiwonpa failed military coup in 1985. The long week of unrest and tragic state of emergency after the failed coup made it nearly impossible to get to a normal food supply and the city needed to survive.  I had driven with her to the Red-Light market in search of scarce rice. When we arrived, there was a clamorous crowd already lined up on a sloping roadside. Men were unloading hundred-pound bags of rice from a truck. Soldiers stood guard with whips ready to lash those who got out of line. We had our doubts about being successful but we hung around, hopeful. I was a firm believer in the Liberian people’s rule of the Patient dog gets the bone mindset. The sun, that day, was a conspirator against accomplishing missions. It stung and bit heads, shoulders, and arms, testing everyone’s willpower. The determined throng, beads of sweat trickling down their foreheads and chests, tried to anchor their footing during the pushing, shoving, and wobbling. Then, the swaying queue broke, when someone was pushed, and squeezed out of place. The unknotted rope of humans became a stack of falling cards. Many were sent sprawling onto the ground, their places in line unrecovered. I recall how those angry voices swelled the air.                      

                Soldiers were whip-ready that hot day as we struggled to get a bag of rice for our home. Dusts-ups and whippings bore evidence in swollen eyes and bleeding lips. Those not strong in muscle and will fled the scene. It was a lost day of waiting for patient shoppers unwilling to wrestle in a line or with the crowd. Many, including Julia and myself, had to go home and return the next day. Go come back was a way of life. Julia always rode shotgun when it came to the food shopping which sometimes took us to the big waterside market in downtown, Monrovia.

        Even after Julia was no longer employed by us full-time, essential ties remained between our family and hers. We helped her to buy a plot of land near our home. She built a small house on it. Soon after that, with her entrepreneurial spirit, she opened a fresh produce stall in the local market on Duport Road where we all lived. 

It was a thriving business that supported her family. We often had her younger children over when we celebrated our children’s birthdays.

           While Julia was part of our lives, we also had a cook and hired a washman, a house cleaner, and a watchman. When necessary, we hired someone to cut our grass. There were always people looking for work. The official salary for domestic workers was low—fifty to one hundred dollars a month. For many, half of one’s salary went to buying a bag of rice to keep the family fed.

Before Julia left our household, we had taken in, Yah, a thirteen-year-old girl, into our home. Her father had had many wives and did not have the means to educate all his children. She belonged to the Mano ethnic group in Nimba County in north-eastern Liberia near the Guinean border.  Her older brother, our house cleaner, had pleaded for us to take her in. This was not unusual.  Middle-class Liberian families regularly took less fortunate children into their homes or would foster disadvantaged children and help to give them an education. Their parents saw this as a chance for a change in fortune.  At thirteen Yah began the first grade at a school nearby. She dressed the youngest, Michael, in the morning before she left for lessons. Yah was assigned her own room and also ate with us. My neighbours objected to me treating her as my own.  They felt, that the treatment would leave her unprepared to fit back in Liberian society if we left the country someday. Although we had never met her parents, her older brother worked in our home and an older sister and brother, who lived in Monrovia, frequently visited. We got to know them well.

But as I came to learn, not all children, uprooted from their families in Liberia and sent to the care of others, accepted such a fate. Some ran away and found their way back home.  A girl. sent to us by an extended Liberian-Grenadian family member, ran away after one night in our home. 

Her family insisted on returning her but we refused.  But, Yah, on the other hand, under our guardianship, completed high school and, during the Civil War, married a minister of the church. I call her my Liberian daughter. When we fled Liberia at the start of the civil war in 1990, we left her in charge of our home. People sheltered there during fierce fighting but she bravely survived and ended up saving our home from destruction. On occasion, she mailed precious photos and documents to us via the Red Cross when the fighting eased.  We have found different ways to show our gratitude for her loyalty.

In 2017, the lines that had once made up my Liberian household, at one point frizzled out by war, ran back together, albeit for a short moment. That January, Cassandra, who is now a historian, used the opportunity of a research visit to Liberia to meet up with Julia and Yah. They were able to meet the child they looked after all those years ago. Yah saw the child who had followed her around, now an adult and a mother, too. More important than the act of bearing gifts was touch: hugging and holding again. Photos taken show the beaming faces of this reunion and the bowl of fufu and soup that welcomed Cassandra home. Julia has since passed but social media enables frequent contact with Yah.

 

        My Liberian household was elemental to the life I lived in Liberia— teaching full time at university, managing a home, and married to a fully occupied professional. Whenever I went off to work, I knew that my home and my children were in good hands.  Getting back home after work, I did not have to worry about preparing meals. On weekends, I did not have to schedule time to dust, wash, or do other chores. There were always people around who we could count on. Coming from the Caribbean, and with family far away, I learned to trust and rely on these wonderful human beings who gave me more than a helping hand. I can only hope for the best for them.

My daughters are lecturers and mothers in Europe and America with young children of their own and do not always have the supporting hands to achieve a similar balancing act in times of need. They walk that tightrope of teaching/working and parenthood.  A good portion of their salaries is doled out to day schools and nurseries. 

Reflecting on my life in Liberia, foremost of my household, and how they impacted my life. They were not just workers in my home; they were my adopted Liberian family, my family away from family.

© Althea Romeo Mark

Notes:

Houseboy- a boy or man employed to undertake domestic duties

Lappa-a West African garment tied around one’s waist in the form of a skirt

 

 

 Althea Romeo Mark, who writes poetry, short stories and personal essays, is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Nakedness of New and If Only the Dust Would Settle, (English-German), and four chapbooks On the Borders of Belonging (2023), Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer, Two Faces, Two Phases, Palaver, and Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi: The Silent Dancing Spirit.

She writes poetry, personal essays and short stories and has been published in Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, The Bahamas, Barbados, Colombia, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya, Liberia, Norway, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, U.K, USA, and the  US, Virgin Islands.