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[close] NOT SO SWEET HOME
Carole Boyce Davies


A Review of The House at Sugar Beach: A Memoir
By Helene Cooper
Simon & Schuster

Like many famous literary houses, Helene Cooper’s childhood home at Sugar Beach was a place for the shaping of identity and memory but also one of pain and loss. Erected in the 1970s by members of the Liberian bourgeoisie, the 22-room house on Liberia’s Atlantic shore may have been opulent, but the family’s young daughters were afraid to sleep in their rooms alone. They feared “heartmen,” or witch doctors; “neegees” who could suck youngsters into the lagoon; “rogues” who stole family treasures, such as the poached ivory collected by the children’s mother. To provide reassurance to 8-year-old Helene and her younger sister Marlene, Cooper’s mother brought Eunice, a native Liberian girl, into the family.

Cooper, now a New York Times reporter, has written a memoir that can also be read as tragedy, one that began in the early 1800s with freed American slaves living out the dream of return to Africa—then re-creating in Liberia the antebellum society they had fled. Cooper is a direct descendent of those freemen who founded the city of Monrovia and, as she has written, “believed they were superior to the less civilized natives and largely controlled the government and economy.”

While Sugar Beach seemed idyllic, it was anything but sweet. Cooper’s father’s departure and subsequent divorce from her mother left the women unprotected. A week before Helene turned 14 and two days after a violent coup overturned the ruling class, soldiers came to the house, terrorizing everyone but Eunice and raping the girls’ mother. The Coopers immediately fled to America; Eunice remained in Liberia. The specters of Cooper’s childhood—the neegees and rogues—were replaced by brutal strongmen like Master Sergeant Doe and Charles Taylor, who dragged the populace into war.

Cooper tells much of her story chronologically, ending with her return to Liberia after a stint as an embedded reporter in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Iraqi War experience is pivotal: She realizes her life could have ended by dumb accident. A U.S. Army tank accidentally rolls into the Humvee in which she is riding, almost crushing her. Lying in the desert sand, soaked in what she thought was her own blood but which turns out to be oil, she thinks, “What a stupid war to die in. If I’m going to die in a war, it should be in my own country. I should die in a war in Liberia.”

When in 2003 she at last visits Sugar Beach, accompanied by Eunice, she finds the house looted and defiled; bodies had recently been dug up on its grounds. The new residents are squatters: “A woman was cooking a pot of rice over coals in the middle of Mommee and Daddy’s bedroom— the very spot where Eunice, Marlene and I had huddled on the night of my mother’s rape.”

Among Cooper’s aims in becoming a journalist were to reveal the atrocities committed in her native country. With amazing forthrightness, she has done so, delivering an eloquent, if painful, history of the African migratory experience.

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CAROLE BOYCE DAVIES is professor of
English and African Diaspora studies at
Florida International University, and
the author of Left of Karl Marx: The
Political Life of Black Communist
Claudia Jones (Duke University Press,
2008).