Customer Reviews

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Ms. Cooper's story is, in so very many ways, my story, too. I grew up in Liberia, a "second-class" American because we were missionaries and not American Embassy personnel. My years at the American Cooperative School overlapped hers; I had the same first grade teacher as her little sister. I bought ice cream at Sophie's (mind the flies!) and ate hamburgers at Diana's. How many times I drove past that same three-headed palm tree! Like her, I left in my early teens, without properly saying goodbye.

Samuel K. Doe's coup d'etat stole Ms. Cooper's childhood; Charles Taylor's invasion in late 1989 stole mine.

Much has been said about Liberia's descent into chaos. But what is never spoken of, in all the reports and documentaries, is the old Liberia - the Liberia that I love, the Liberia of my heart, the Liberia of people who have never given up hope, even in the darkest hour, that they can rebuild out the ashes of evil.

It will be several years yet before I can make the trip that Ms. Cooper has, and return home. I'd like to stand in our old house on Old Road, if only just to prove that the first 15 years of my life weren't a dream. Maybe the mango tree is still there. In the meantime, I have her book, to help me remember that I have come from somewhere. Home is still there, in the coalpots and red dirt roads, in the potato greens and the palm butter, in the sound of the ocean at night.

For all the horrors that war has visited upon my hometown, Liberia stands. The rice bird still sings.

I eagerly awaited the release of Cooper's book after reading the excerpt in the New York Times Magazine earlier this spring. The book arrived and did not disappoint. I could not put the book down and finished it in one sitting. Cooper's writing is honest, sincere and raw. I found myself drawn to her childhood and her adventures as if they were my own. While Cooper leaves out answers to many questions I had about her life in high school and college, she does come full circle in acknowledging the impact of her childhood on her life today. A masterful book. I was left wanting to read more about the Coopers.

Helene Cooper has written a memoir of her privilege African childhood in Liberia before the slaughters of the civil war destroyed the country and her lifestyle. Descended from a family of strong women, she comically describes their mansion at Sugar Beach before the horrors of the soldiers. Written in a you are there style, she conveys all changes of coming to America as a nobody and remaking herself as a journalist. The last part of the book concerns her journey homeward to search for a lost foster sister and to come full circle again.

Covering the Middle East War in 2003, correspondent Helene Cooper had memories of another war; the war that tore her away from the place of her birth, Liberia. In The House on Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood Cooper wrote a gripping memoir that is not only a family history, but a social, cultural and historical account of this country.

Cooper is a direct descendant of the first black Americans who migrated to Liberia in the 1820s to establish a haven for freed blacks. Elijah Johnson, her maternal ancestor and Randolph Cooper, her paternal ancestor, were pioneers in the Back to Africa movement with help from the British government to start over in West Africa. Within a few years, the new settlers succeeded in not only building a new community, but became the ruling class with all of the privileges and advantages that came with it. A class divide emerged and the newcomers were deemed "Congo" while the natives were called "Natives" or the derogatory term "Country." Cooper's family lived in a twenty-two room mansion by the sea called Sugar Beach replete with servants and a privileged life that included private schools and a summer home in Spain. Her father was a government official and many other family members had positions of power in the cabinet.

When Cooper was nine years-old, her family took in a girl from the Bassa tribe to be a companion to Cooper and her younger sister, Marlene. It was common practice for Congo people to "adopt" Native children; the Congo family got help and the Native child was taken out of impoverished conditions and given an education. Eunice was an integral part of the family for the most part but when a coup occurred in 1982, Cooper's family fled Liberia, leaving Eunice behind. The Natives, after years of oppression and unable to rise above their station in life, decided to take matters in their own hands, wrestling power away from the Congo elite.

Cooper's acclimation to the United States was a culture shock and like many immigrants, her family's lifestyle drastically changed. Her family first moved to Tennessee where she had difficulty making friends. It was in college that she came into her own and eventually became a journalist working for several prominent newspapers including The Washington Journal and The New York Times. It was over twenty years before Cooper set foot on Liberian soil and reunited with her long lost sister, Eunice.

This was a powerful story, one that was an education for me and members of my online and local book club members. Most of us remember the media reporting on the war in Liberia and the reigns of presidents Tolbert and Charles Taylor but felt disconnected to the turmoil that was occurring. This book brought to life the cultural aspects, including intra-racial and class divisions, the oppression of the Native people, and a keen awareness of the analogy of American slavery of Africans juxtaposed against the oppression of Native Africans by freed Black Americans. The political and historical aspects of this memoir are a great addition to the growing number of African childhood war stories that have graced the literary arena in the last few years. 4.5 rating

I finished The House at Sugar Beach in a day an a half; I just could not put it down. Helene Cooper objectively and clearly paints a picture of privilege and wealth of the Congo People in the country of Liberia, West Africa, as they lived and interacted with the poverty and subjugation of the Native people. She is able to make the reader see and feel the emotions and tensions of the country just before it's entire infrastructure was destroyed by a horrible Civil War. She reminisces through her childhood in want of nothing, and carries the reader along as she struggles with fears of the unknown spirit world, the pomp and formality of her social strata, and the joy of life that was so abundant in everyone during those prewar years. We get to intimately know her family and their outstanding importance to the history of the settlement of the country. She helps us understand how the tensions arose that caused such devastation to the only country in Africa that America helped settle; and she describes the horrors the War brought to her family as they fled the country in fear of their lives. As she noted, her family "boarded the plane in Liberia as "privileged, elite Congo People", but arrived at their destination in America as "African refugees."

Cooper then tells us about her adjustments and growth in her new home; and about the schools and attitudes in the South about the "new kid" with the funny accent. It took a while, but Cooper comes full circle with her emotions and finally was able to return to her country and face her beloved, but destroyed past. She finds satisfaction in the fact that the country of Liberia has survived along with a few faithful people who represented a vital part of her family.

The reader is on a roller coaster of emotion as Cooper makes us cry and laugh, sympathize and get angry on almost every page. This book is an excellent read for the early American or African history buff, for the person who just wants a really good story of the maturing of a young girl through family struggles and situations of life, and most especially for anyone who has ever had any contact at all with West Africa.

I walked into Starbucks on Saturday and the title of the book caught my eye...why? because I was born in Liberia and grew up in a house on Sugar Beach. I read the book in 7hrs, emailed all my friends and told them they had to read it. Ms. Cooper took me home after 18yrs away. I was taken back to my life as an 11yr old growing up with my cousin on Sugar Beach. I felt every emotion Ms. Cooper felt when she first moved to Sugar Beach. I laughed and cried all at the same time. It was worth every dollar spent.

I do hope to go back to Sugar Beach in the future and see what has become of it.

Though a memoir is, by definition, focused on the author's life, Cooper's work is self-centered in the extreme. She never really answers the key question -- why did she and the rest of her family abandon her foster sister for so many years? And she presents nothing more than a caricature of the lives and society of the less-privileged native Liberian people and the discrimination against them by those of her own elite and wealthy class.

I caught the tail end of an NPR interview with Helene Cooper a few months ago and dashed out the same day to get the book. I was so disappointed. Though she does provide readers vivid details about the Liberia of her childhood, that's where the good descriptions end. As I rounded page 200 or so I began to wonder what had motivated Ms. Cooper to write this book. Either her story genuinely isn't compelling or this was just bad writing. And where on earth is her self awareness? I was waiting for her to acknowledge that the ruling class's treatement of native Liberians had lead to the coup that "ended her childhoood." I would have been much more interested in a book written by her mother who always seemed to put her children first even when that meant sacrificing herself and the lifestyle to which she had come accustomed.
I'm the kind of reader who tends to commit to a book, but I found myself reading ahead and hoping for some excitement or perspective...anything to make finishing the book worthwhile.

Helene Cooper's memoir of growing up in Liberia is one of those books that you just can't put down. I was pretty groggy there for a few days after reading late into the night!

Because I grew up in the U.S. at the same time as the author, I was captivated by the stories of her girlhood. Nancy Drew, green eye shadow, Barry White, velvet upholstery... even singing Blessed Assurance endlessly in church. It all sounds so familiar, and yet, that's where the similarity ends. Guns and war, soldiers and strongmen, rapes and executions. We who grew up in the relative safety of the U.S. in the latter part of the twentieth century can barely form mental images of the scenes she describes.

The professional reviews of this book say its tone is flat. I don't agree. I like the factual, unsentimental tone of the book. The author is reporting her life, in all its glory and its ugliness. If she maintains a certain reserve, or a little distance, for her sanity's sake, she sure has the right. God bless her just for surviving.

When the book ended, I was left with the question of whether Ms. Cooper ever went back to Liberia after her visit to find her sister Eunice. I looked up her bylines in the New York Times and enjoyed reading her articles. An epilogue about her continuing relationship with the country would have been a welcome addition to the book. Here is one of her dispatches: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/opinion/16wed4.html?scp=4&sq=liberia&st=nyt.

If I could rate separately for editing, I would. Ms. Cooper's editors failed her. In another edition of the book, I hope they will fix such silly errors as using "who's" instead of "whose" and spell names consistently (Mommee/Mommy). In many places, information is repeated; in two successive paragraphs, for example, the family cook is described as grumpy and irascible. It detracts from the book in a regrettable way.

But not to end this review on a grumpy and irascible note. I loved this book and I suggest you read it along with Lawrence Hill's Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, which is based on historical events and tells the story of a woman who was enslaved in the South but who returns with the colony of African-Americans who founded Sierra Leone after the Revolutionary War. It provides another colorful look at this part of the world.

I spent the summer of 1965 in Monrovia, Liberia. My daughter was born there in August. The Peace Corps had sent me in June because the maternity hospital in Sierra Leone had problems with childbed fever. I worked in the Peace Corps office as office assistant to the doctor and nurse. In the Sinkor section of Monrovia, I went to Cooper's Clinic. The doctor was a short, middle aged man who came to check on my daughter and me one morning in the wee hours, dressed in a cutaway coat, striped pants and top hat. He was a member of Liberia's upper class, the Americo-Liberians, descendants of the freed slaves who originally settled what was, before the 1950ies, the only independent republic in West Africa. Sierra Leone, where I was a serving Peace Corps Volunteer, had a similar class, called Krios, who descended from freed slaves brought from British America, but because Sierra Leone had been a British colony, the Krios hadn't run the country, only worked in administrative positions under the British. They'd found themselves in the minority, though, with independence in 1961, and the largest tribe, the Mende, held the presidency and other important offices. Liberia was different because it was independent. There'd been no similar check on the Americo-Liberian regime.

I was intrigued when I first heard of Cooper's book. She's an Americo-Liberian, driven from her home by the civil war in Liberia, who's now a reporter for the New York Times. It's easy to find email addresses of Times' reporters so I wrote to her and discovered that she is from "that Cooper family", that she too was delivered by Dr. Cooper in his Sinkor clinic, some months after my daughter.

I read her book almost in one sitting, fascinated. I had this picture in my mind of Monrovia in 1965, sort of like a run down Southern town. With stop lights! (Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, at the time had only one stoplight). In the back of my mind was a garden party of the ruling class I'd seen once where the guests were all dressed like they stepped off the set of Gone with the Wind--Scarlett O'Hara gowns and cutaway coats. Then there was the scandal that summer, a ritual murder with the latest investigation news every morning in the newspaper until one day President Taubman walked in the closed it all down. Rumor had it that the VP was involved. Sierra Leone seemed to me much safer and more civilized in those days, newly embarked on representative democracy as it was.

Cooper's book took me back to the place, but from an entirely different point of view, that of an upper class girl, from the "Congo people" (In Freetown there's a "Congo River" so named because some of the freed slaves came from the Congo; it was generally assumed, evidently, in both places that all the freed slaves from the western hemisphere had originally come from Congo.) All the rest of the people--those I'd heard Americo-Liberians in a restaurant once refer to as aboriginals--were "country people". Cooper characterizes life in the big house on Sugar Beach as privileged. Like the majority of aristocrats everywhere they had servants and treated them well. The children depended on them and loved them. They recognized that "country people" didn't have their advantages. They didn't have forebearers who'd come over on the equivalent of the Mayflower; they didn't have relatives in the top echelon of the government. A unique advantage Cooper recognized was that she grew up black and privileged, with no taint of either slavery or colonial domination in her past. Not only did she escape the discrimination experienced by blacks in the US, but there wasn't any colonial past which had burnt into the people that white people were superior.

Cooper's idyllic childhood was interrupted when Samuel Doe, a renegade army officer, raided the Presidential Palace, killed the president (he who had been the VP I remembered as being silently accused of involvement in ritual murder) and took over the government. Within days, Cooper saw her cousin, the foreign minister, executed on television along with other high government officials. Soldiers came to Sugar Beach where she was living with her mother and siblings, and threatened them (earlier she'd explained that "rogues" often came to steal from the house, but they weren't called "thieves" because that word was reserved for government officials who stole). Now the rebel soldiers were on a drunken rampage and Congo people no longer had the upper hand. Cooper's mother went to the basement with them if they agreed not to rape her daughters.

Shortly thereafter, mother and daughters were on a plane to America. Where life was not nearly as easy and where everyone asked Helene where she was from and then asked "Where's that?" Money was short. The daughters lived alternately with mother and father (now divorced) while one or the other went back to Liberia to see family or salvage what they could from land and houses that had not been confiscated.

Finally after a frightening accident during the invasion of Iraq, where she was embedded with American soldiers on their way from Kuwait to Baghdad, Cooper decided it was time to go back to Liberia. "If I'm going to die in a war," she thought trapped in a Humvee, "it should be in my own country."

I really connected with this book, partly because I had had some experience in Liberia and partly because Cooper tells her story very well. I was even interested in her childhood fears (of "heartmen" who'd chase you down and cut your heart out) and her adolescent crushes in a Liberian private school and her attempts to fade into the woodwork in successive American schools.