The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir

But Papa was right that most Liberians, most, did not choose Liberia to be their country. Just as Ivorians did not choose. Just as Ghanaians and so many others did not choose; some men in Berlin in 1884 drew those lines, gave those names. Without agency, who can love a country forced upon them?

Those princes from my childhood were fighting not only for their people but also for their nations, the countries they chose. Gio is a country. Mano is a country. Kpelle is a country. Vai is a country. And these nations were centuries old. Men and women across the continent would die with those nationhoods on their hearts.

I could be beautiful in a place and still not enough, not because of who I was or anything I had done, but because of something as simple, and somehow as grand in this new place, as the color of my skin.

Barely one year in and our new country let us know, every day, that we were different.

And I want to find the words, the poetry, to give her the thanks she deserves for her shoulder. For stirring my ginger tea all those times my voice got lost in that job/man/city. For understanding what it was like to be at that table, to be a young girl just learning how much the world's opinion of you differed from your loving Mam's. Those girls helped me. They healed me. She heals me. But another thing had happened and she forgot her power. Another thing happens and she becomes that little girl, running. Racing to safety, to be better than each other, to be better than ourselves, to be seen.

I think, as women of color, especially women of color who come from some means, any means really, we tend to play down the unpleasant things we've experienced. To bury them ... Perfection or the desire for it, it becomes a mask ... a uniform. But there is something underneath. What's underneath makes us real.

There are many stories of war to tell. You will hear them all. But remember among those who were lost, some made it through. Among the dragons there will always be heroes. Even there. Even then. And of those tales ending in defeat, tales of death and orphans wandering among the ruined, some ended the other way too.

There is a weight that builds on shoulders when one leaves home. The longer a person stays away, the heavier the burden of displacement.

But there were things I went into the world not knowing. We did not talk about what to do when a boy was unkind, in words or actions, breaking my heart. I was lousy in the ways of healing. Mam had one true love and she married him. She had one true love in a country of women like her, whose sun took turns resting on their deep, dark skin. My true loves in our new country, by either inheritance or indoctrination, were taught that black women were the least among them. Loving me was an act of resistance, though many did not know it. And Mam could not understand this feeling, the heaviness of it, to be loved as resistance, as an exception to a rule. To fight to be seen in love, to stay in love throughout the resistance. This was my new country.