Traveling Through A Liberian Childhood

I like to explore the world with books as much as I like to actually travel. A well-written narrative can transport you to places that you'd never experience with just superficial details like photos and descriptions. I've been interviewing writers about the criteria they use to select books for Summer reading and it made me think about my own general reading criteria. As a journalist, I'm really drawn to biographies, autobiographies and memoirs more than fiction. There's something about using the facts to entice readers into your world that gets me. It's no coincidence that some of my favorite writers--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zora Neale Hurston, Hemingway, started out as journalists. So when I glimpsed The House at Sugar Beach, at my local bookstore and saw it was a memoir written by a journalist, it was pretty much a done deal that I would buy it.

Now it wasn't only that the author Helene Cooper was a journalist, it was that she was a Liberian journalist chronicling her childhood as a member of the Liberian elite. Liberia is a country that claims an extremely complicated history. It was founded by American blacks in the 1820s and enjoyed generations of prosperity and peace. But discontent bubbled beneath the surface. Native Liberians resented the domination of the Americans and the 80s set off decades of civil wars and coups. I know all of this not because it's covered in the book but because my first college roommate was Rita Tolbert, niece of the President of Liberia and a member of the same elite group as Helene Cooper. President Tolbert was assassinated in 1980 and Rita alluded to threatened rapes, torture and lonely English boarding schools when she summed up her journey to the U.S. At the time, I only understood a little of the political situation on the African continent and I never asked Rita the probing questions that are typical for me.

So I devoured The House at Sugar Beach, eager to witness the details that had escaped me before. Helene Cooper totally delivers. From the rhythm and vernacular of Liberian English, to the cognac-colored couches that filled the 22-room, waterfront mansion where she lived, Cooper escorts her readers on a full tour of 1970s Liberia. We see the olive groves that surround their Summer house in Spain, the shacks that edge the elaborate estates of Congo people, (descendants of the American settlers) and we recognize the intensifying resentment of Native Liberians living in squalor. She also intersperses her accounts with the significant history of her family's involvement in settling Liberia and the political unrest that connects to it.

The House at Sugar Beach rivets you with the nuances of Cooper's childhood, like reading Barbara Cartland novels, eating fufu and pepper soup and telling "heartmen" stories, about men who cut the hearts out of people to sell them. The book also translates the horror of living through a coup 'd tat, where relatives were killed or raped, including Cooper's mother. Cooper, who now covers the White House for the New York Times, says the inspiration to write her story came when she realized that as a foreign correspondent, she had traveled through war zones and battle fields to record the stories of other countries, but never her own. But now Liberia has a richly defined account, that dives beyond the wars and struggles. I highly recommend The House at Sugar Beach.