The Best of Friends Read online

  I’d considered many dangers in taking this assignment, but being traded for cows hadn’t been one of them. But as I smiled, ready with a quick retort, he added, “The man did have one question. He wanted to know how many children you have.”

  “I’m not married. I don’t have kids.”

  He looked shocked. “What? No children?” He shook his head. “That is very sad. You are a poor woman indeed.”

  And suddenly an amusing situation wasn’t funny at all. In fact, his comment stung like a slap in the face. I opened my mouth to argue that I was an independent, successful professional woman. But what was the point? It wouldn’t change his opinion. Besides, infuriated as I was, I was also alarmed at how much his offhand comment had shaken me. With nothing to say, I took a shot of already warm water from my canteen and tried to remind myself why I’d wanted to come to Sudan in the first place.

  For me the assignment wasn’t just professional—it was personal. At thirty-five years old, I’d lived in New York for four years, long enough for the city to feel like home, especially since my mom had been born there. But I was also a daughter of the South. During the Civil War, Richmond, just two hours south of Washington, D.C., had served as capital of the Confederacy. Even today the city’s most beautiful street, Monument Avenue, is a Southern Hall of Fame, with statues in honor of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and J. E. B. Stuart. In fact Ginger’s younger sister Dona married Stuart’s handsome, upstanding great-great-grandson.

  Richmond has changed over the years. Indeed, the most recent statue on Monument Avenue is of an African-American man armed only with a tennis racket. Once banned from the city’s whites-only courts, tennis great Arthur Ashe now shares an address with those who fought to create a country in which he could have been a slave. Much as I loved Virginia and being a Virginian, for me being born in the South also meant feeling both sorrow and shame regarding the disgrace of slavery. The thought that slavery might still exist was not just barbaric, it was obscene. After all, a Virginian had written the Declaration of Independence, with that stirring promise that all men are created equal, and my own liberated life made it impossible to imagine one person owning another.

  I THINK I expected some Hollywood version of a slave market—a wooden platform where the overseer cracked his whip while men, women, and children were paraded. But this auction was clandestine. At the edge of a large open market where the local Dinka people came to buy sugar, flour, and cattle, a slave trader aptly named Chain lurked under a copse of trees. While he was dressed in long, flowing white robes, the bony, sickly-looking boys and girls huddled together in the shade were dressed in rags, as if they might still be wearing the clothes they’d had on when they’d been kidnapped, as long as five years before. Nearby, families had gathered, hoping to find long-lost children. But buying a child’s freedom cost hundreds of dollars, and most of these families were penniless. That meant Baroness Cox, an outspoken opponent of slavery, would now be in the awkward position of becoming an unwilling participant in an ancient, ugly transaction. She had brought thousands of dollars raised overseas to purchase as many slaves as possible. Now she must haggle with Chain.

  “What price freedom?” she said in a voice choked with outrage, each time a child was brought forward and a wad of money changed hands.

  One little boy told us, “We were forced to herd livestock. If we complained, they beat us.”

  I asked another, “When was the last time you saw your mother and father?”

  He looked down, kicked at the dust, and I saw the scars on his ankles left by the ropes which had kept him tied to a post so he wouldn’t run away. “Four years ago,” came the desolate reply, and I thought I would weep. No chance to run or chase or kick a ball. No one to hug him when he tumbled, no one to kiss him good night. Four years. Half his short, tragic life. The little children told of how they’d been fed little more than scraps thrown to a dog, how they’d sometimes been so hungry they’d eaten grass. But some stories were too terrible to tell, and could be glimpsed only in the haunted look in their eyes. Beatings. Rapes. Murders. Memories of fathers who had been shot, of brothers and sisters lost, never to return.

  As the bartering continued, it felt indecent, as if some sort of stain were seeping into me. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Chain was every bit as ruthless as I’d expected, snatching bills, shoving children. I wanted to jump in, grab that little girl with her dirty brown hair and knobby knees, that little boy with his wobbly lip, scoop them in my arms, and flee. How could my ancestors have done this?

  When the whole awful business was over, Baroness Cox sighed with relief. She had liberated fifteen little boys and girls, paying the equivalent of five hundred U.S. dollars for each, and the children were now enveloped by waiting mothers and fathers. “It’s such a distressing situation to be part of that words cannot convey the distaste of being part of that transaction, but what do you do?” she told us. And yet she had no qualms about what her organization was doing, dismissing any suggestion that paying to free the children would increase the number of children kidnapped and enslaved.

  “That’s rubbish. Slavery was going on before we ever came.”

  The baroness told us the best chance of eliminating the slave trade would be to bring world attention to the plight of those in southern Sudan, in the hope that international pressure might bring an end to the wretched practice.

  I looked at the faces of these children, and thought of my new goddaughter Hannah back home, whose life was so different from the lives of children here. I thought of all the stories I’d covered overseas and at home where defenseless children had been the victim of trauma and tragedy—in Somalia, in Oklahoma City, and now in Sudan. And suddenly the pressure I felt wasn’t international but personal.

  I had an impotent urge to rescue them all, especially one girl of about nine. She and her mother and sister had been taken during a raid two years before, as her father, Apin Apin Acot, watched helplessly. She sat on his lap, head tucked into his shoulder, as he protectively held his arm around her. “Look at her leg,” Apin told us, gesturing. The girl’s leg had been broken but never reset, so that she would walk with a severe limp for the rest of her life. “She was not born like this. This happened when they took her.” His face showed the anguish of any father unable to protect his child from a desperate fate. And then he told us of his older daughter, who remained in bondage, reserved as a future concubine, and his eyes filled with tears. “She told me death is the only bad thing in life. As long as you are alive, I know you will try to get me out.” I thought I would split apart with the weight of it all.

  Yet, to my surprise, as Apin turned to look closely at the little girl on his knee, his worn face creased in the barest of smiles, and there came over his face an expression I could only identify as hope. Hope in spite of the fact that his wife had been raped repeatedly during her captivity, in spite of the fact that his daughter would be crippled for life. And then I realized. He had hope because they were alive. What’s more, Baroness Cox would give him money to purchase his older daughter, and then his family would be united once more. And that was enough for him to believe that, in spite of a bleak past, the future might be better.

  As I looked around, I saw the same expression on the faces of others who had been reunited. This was a hope wilder, stronger than I’d ever encountered, a hope powerful enough to crack through an arid wasteland of despair. While they had lost the most precious gift of their lives, that gift had been found. Their children were home. Anything was possible.

  THE FOLLOWING DAYS passed quickly, days in which we worked from dawn until the sun slipped over the edge of the world, when we crawled into our tents for a few hours of hot, fitful sleep. One morning we heard the sound of shouting as a group of men came carrying several injured men. It turned out the dreaded train and its trail of bandits had arrived in the region the day after we had, and their village—just fourteen miles away from us—had been attacked by those militias.r />
  One of the men had the most gruesome wound I’d ever seen. He’d been hacked with a machete and he was missing half his face. Without a mouth he was unable to speak, but the agony showed plainly in his tortured, pleading eyes. The others explained that he’d been attacked when he tried to prevent the marauders from kidnapping a child. We managed to get him airlifted to a hospital but he soon died. Only when that same plane returned for us two days later and we took off for Kenya did I dare to relax.

  But as the plane rose sharply and danger both receded and compressed, I had an immediate, uncomfortable realization. There had been no time to think of something so inconsequential during the past week, but suddenly I realized that I stank. The smell of my own body made me nauseous, the smell of days without a bath, the smell of greasy hair, and worst of all, the lingering scent of fear. I was trapped on that tiny plane with my own rank odor and equally intense thoughts.

  As we flew over that shimmering East African landscape, I suddenly felt lost, as if the cerulean sky were instead a vast, nameless sea and I was alone in a dinghy, shouting for help, but no one could hear me. I was thirty-five years old and alarmingly adrift. I had a new job, a lovely apartment, a life I loved. I had felt independent and free. But after this harrowing, isolating experience, I realized again that I wanted someone, not just something, to call my own. What use was freedom if you became so shackled to autonomy that you couldn’t share your life with someone else?

  I’d tempted fate in Nicaragua, the Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, and now Sudan. I’d seen people who’d been shot, macheted, stabbed, beaten, tortured, raped. I’d frightened my parents and sisters more times than I cared to remember, and this world of hard living and too-easy dying was losing its allure.

  High above the African plains, it was possible to see life from a distance. And as I looked out the window I finally acknowledged just how badly I wanted to have a child of my own. To feel the kind of love I’d seen on that father’s face. Suddenly everything I had, all that I’d accomplished, seemed insignificant in the face of his blazing devotion. Once I had thought having a child might spell the end of chasing my dreams, but my time in that crucible had reminded me that for many people around the world, having the love of a child was the most important dream of all.

  And then there was the question of Andrew. I missed my ex-boyfriend far more than I wanted to admit. He was not a Boy Toy any longer but a grown man who was clearly moving on without me. I needed to make my own plans.

  Fortunately, I knew that there was someone I could turn to, someone who could guide me through this turbulence, and I’d see her in just a few days. What’s more, this trip, my third to Namibia, wouldn’t be purely social. When I’d learned about the Sudan assignment, I’d suggested another African story to Dateline’s executive producer—a story about a gorgeous filmmaker who’d spent years documenting the lives of a remote troop of baboons. Neal had loved it, and smiled when I mentioned that the filmmaker was my best friend. So now I would have the chance to talk to Ginger in person about what felt like clashing emotions I was only beginning to explore.

  21

  GINGER (1996–1997)

  SEVEN YEARS IN Africa had taught me to listen to the sound of the wind, the snapping of branches, and to listen especially hard whenever I heard the whisper of instinct invade, then overwhelm my thoughts. On that particular night, it was quiet, too quiet, even for the middle of the night in the bush. No plaintive owl hoots, no crunching of hooves on rocks or gentle bays as animals moved closer to the waterhole for a midnight drink. Nothing. Beside me Nad was asleep. I peered into the darkness, listening to the silence for a few more minutes before closing my eyes. Then a wave of sound shook the ground. It was the same sound that drove our ancestors into caves, that inspired them to make and master weapons, a sound that a million years later caused the hairs on the back of my neck to rise. Danger was not only audible, it was stalking us, coming into focus and taking shape.

  “Sara. Lisa. Wake up. They’re here.” As much as they needed sleep after their Sudan ordeal, Sara and Lisa needed to see this even more, to be reminded that Africa was also a place of wonder and astonishing beauty, where power had a purpose and wasn’t always abused. I rolled over onto my belly, propped myself up on one elbow, and ran a hand through Nad’s hair.

  “Sara will be so happy.” He smiled, his eyes still closed.

  Fifteen feet above us in the tower hide at Gobaub waterhole in Etosha, I heard the ruffle of nylon sleeping bags, then saw the dim light from two tiny beams scanning the bush. “Gin, is that what I think it is?” The lights met and reflected off one large tawny animal. Before I could speak, Sara’s question was answered by one tremendous roar. In this part of Africa, Lion was still King.

  Nad had been right. This camping trip into the wilds of Etosha was just what Sara and Lisa, her friend and producer from NBC, needed. When they’d arrived a few days before, the strains of their most recent assignment were evident, not so much in what they said as in what they didn’t say. As if the horrors were still unspeakable. At night, around the fire, I saw Lisa withdraw, lost in thought, her arms wrapped protectively around her slender waist. One minute Sara would be laughing, then she’d bite her lip and rub her eyes as if to erase a memory I could scarcely imagine. With this camping trip we hoped they could replace their visions of appalling suffering with those of elephants dust-bathing and springbok pronking, of toasting fiery sunsets and drinking ice-cold beer. Sara and Lisa could finally relax; it was my turn to worry.

  I—or at least the Dateline segment about me—was the light diversion in an otherwise horrific trip for them. The only problem was, now I was scared. Not for my life, but for my career. Ratings for natural history programs were up, and because the costs of making wildlife films was low compared with sitcoms and dramas, television stations around the world were responding to the demand by buying more and more programming. Jen and Des Bartlett’s Skeleton Coast Safari series, with our baboon film included, was riding the wave. The series had just sold to Channel 4 in the UK and PBS in the U.S. Now Dateline was covering our story. I was thrilled but nervous, remembering all too well the words of one commissioning editor after he’d seen a short scene from our film: “I don’t like baboons, and I would never, ever watch ugly baboons on TV.” So the question remained: Would viewers watch our baboons, and my life with them, as told by Sara on NBC?

  With Lisa directing, a South African cameraman and soundman stayed at my shoulder, recording my every move. For three days I did as I was asked, finding it mildly amusing to be on the other side of the camera.

  “Gin, walk out onto the pan, put your camera down, and pretend to shoot. Turn, turn. Okay, now pick up your camera and walk to my right. No, my right.”

  “Okay,” came the voice from the walkie-talkie, “drive toward me, past the camera. Great. Do it again.”

  “That’s a great tree. Would you please climb up there with your binoculars and pick them up, turn around, then put them down. Can you do it a couple more times?” And so it went. From sunrise to sunset, I scouted locations, gazed deliberately through my binoculars, pulled focus, zoomed in, zoomed out, and did a meaningful scene in our spinach patch. It wasn’t long before I yearned to be on the other side of the camera.

  Sara and Lisa had ticked off the shots, giving me time to relax in front of the camera, until there was no more avoiding the interview I’d dreaded from day one. In her career, Sara had grilled politicians and executives, famous celebrities and infamous murderers. She probably couldn’t count the number of interviews she’d done. Hundreds? I could count the times I’d been interviewed. Zero. For my first, there would be no peeking at the questions beforehand, no Cliff Notes, no warm-ups, just a call to be ready first thing in the morning. Rise and shine.

  “Sleep well?” Sara asked while we dodged each other, vying for space in front of the small cracked mirror above the sink in our bathroom, the only mirror in the house.

  “All right,” I muttered.

  �
��I like your shirt. Pink is a great color on you, and that shade isn’t too pale for TV.”

  “Thanks.” Also muttered.

  “Want to try my lipstick?”

  “No thanks.”

  Applying a final stroke of mascara, she smiled. “Gin, would you please get me a cup of coffee?”

  “Get your own damn coffee,” I snapped. What a way to start the morning. Did I look like a maid? This wasn’t fun anymore. Everything I’d enjoyed over the past few days—the filming and relaxing around the fire at night with the crew—now seemed like a chore. All I could remember was that, behind the scenes, I’d been the one doing all the cooking and cleaning for four extra people. And now, coffee. Sara obviously didn’t have a clue what was going on with me. Couldn’t my friend tell that what I needed was reassurance, not lipstick. For her, this might be a simple interview, a few questions, but the thought of it had kept me awake at night. I knew my panic was ridiculous but it was also real—I was afraid I’d embarrass my friend and myself. But instead of sharing those fears with Sara, I did what was predictable with me: I kept them inside, expecting my friend to understand, then, when she’d asked for coffee, I’d cracked.

  “Sure, Gin.” Sara’s quiet voice brought me back. “Can I get you some coffee, too?” And when I’d shaken my head, she’d said, “You’ll do great, Gin. Don’t worry.”

  When we pulled the Land Rover up in front of a grove of trees where the cameras were set up and two chairs were placed in the long grass, facing each other, Lisa walked calmly toward us. “Sara, don’t panic, but we just saw a snake.” Clearly Lisa also knew about Sara’s phobia. The morning was only getting worse.

  Finally the cameras were rolling. Sara looked me in the eye, tilted her head slightly to the side, and asked, “Had you ever shot a film camera before?”