The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2009

They were standing there looking toward Hopetown, and I turned and looked, too. People were gathering on a hill above the truck. The man told his wife to get in the car, and they drove off. The driver climbed into the bed of the truck and threw a burlap sack on the grass by the road. Then quickly he was off the truck and back in the front seat. “Get in,” he said. “I’m not going with you.” “Get in!” “I want my pack.” “Fine. You want to explain it to them?” Ten or 20 blacks were running down the hill. He went to give me my pack, which was behind his seat. Then he stopped, sort of grin- ning, “They’ll think you did it.” “So what? I didn’t do it. It was you and that other bas- tard.” “Think they’ll listen? Don’t you know what they’ll do to you?” I looked at him for an instant. “Don’t be stupid. Get in!” It started to rain. The drops hit the metal of the cab with a ting, ting sound. They made wet little circles on the faded green paint and shrank to nothing almost as fast. Big hard drops slapped the dust on the road. I wasn’t afraid of the Africans or what they might do to me. It wasn’t that. It was that I didn’t think I could bear their eyes on me. I just couldn’t explain to Joshua’s mother who I was and why her son was lying dead in the road. The police would come, but who would do anything to two white men for the death of a black, on the word of a for- eigner? And anyway, hadn’t it been an accident? Now the rain was falling steadily. The truck’s wipers creaked tiredly across the windshield. It was almost night. People were walking along the road toward Hopetown. Balancing tools and bundles on their heads, they tried to shield their eyes from the headlights. As they ran off the road to make room for the truck, they held the bundles on their heads with their hands. The truck roared along the black highway into the darkness. ■ J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 F O C U S