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Strange Land
U.S. refugee retains roots in native Liberian home
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Published: September 28, 2008
THE HOUSE AT SUGAR BEACH: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. By Helene Cooper. Simon and Schuster. 368 pages. $25.
Helene Cooper honed this far-reaching autobiographical work for four years. Subtitled "In Search of a Lost African Childhood," it is a saga of victory over personal separation and sorrow for a lost homeland.
Cooper, who now works for The New York Times as an international reporter, roved the world in search of hot stories, but came back to what she knows best -- the tale of a refugee, a transplanted Liberian girl who was forced by evil circumstances to come to a foreign, baffling but ultimately welcoming land in search of peace. Born to one of the wealthiest and most prestigious families in Liberia (her parents were descendants of the original settlers), Helene was a happy, normal child of privilege until Samuel K. Doe staged a bloody coup in Liberia in 1980. At age 14 she witnessed the brutal execution of government ministers, some of them members of her own family. These savage acts took place near her family's palatial home at Sugar Beach, where later her mother was gang-raped, and where, later still, the dictator Doe and his minions set up a killing factory. Cooper's childhood was stolen and her survival in question.
The family used its resources to get Helene, her father and some of her siblings out of Liberia, first to Knoxville, Tenn., and then to Greensboro. Left behind was her mother, who scraped together an income from rental properties and sent money to the émigrés, and a girl named Eunice, whom the family had hired as a childhood companion for Helene. Eunice was a local, tribal person, while Helene's family was "American." Though many members of the ruling echelon used local people as servants, considered them inferior, and tolerated no class mixing, Eunice was treated like a beloved member of Helene's family. In leaving her, Helene was involuntarily excising a significant piece of her past.
In the American South, things were not easy at first for a teen with culture shock and an innate belief in her superiority as a member of the Liberian ruling class. Her attempts to socialize included the sad realization that most high-school kids in Greensboro had never heard of Liberia. She had to learn about clothing styles, social customs and true equality. These were lessons that came to her slowly, along with the gradual development of her talent as a writer. In her freshman year at UNC Chapel Hill, she submitted a passionate article about South Africa, the burning issue of the day, to the Daily Tar Heel. It was published, giving her abilities (and her African heritage) the recognition she'd been longing for. She graduated from the UNC School of Journalism with a job offer already on her plate.
After a stint with The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, she was sought by The Wall Street Journal, where initially she was given the Deep South business beat. While she was composing articles about Coca-Cola profits in Georgia, Liberia was back in the headlines with another violent coup and the sadistic execution of the tyrannical Doe. Though she had full U.S. citizenship and her mother was now living safely in America, Cooper knew that she must return to the land of her birth. She had to find Eunice.
The last quarter of Cooper's story is given over to her reunion with her adopted sister and her return to the house at Sugar Beach, where, she learned, many dismembered bodies had been exhumed from the once-flourishing garden. The total devastation and decay of that once joyous house symbolize the loss of country and home together. Yet Cooper's book ends hopefully, and will have readers longing for a sequel.
■ Barbara Scott is a writer and reviewer who lives in Mount Airy.
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