Cameras. Lights. His face on television, pinched, distraught, out of control as he wept. He had never intended to break down in front of all these people, but the horrible loss of his one-year-old son, an infinitely vulnerable baby, pushed him to it. He had shaken her on camera. Taken her by the shoulders, shouted. Her face blank when they played it back, white in the glare of the lights,

I will climb my mother to Heaven, he said to himself, tittering, mumbling, unafraid to walk the dusty streets of Gbarnga day or night even during the riots because his mother, the woman who loved him, the woman he found years ago after coming home from the market with no chicken but the head of a cassava fish a merchant had thrown to the dogs and found boys no older than himself, six or seven, Charles Taylor’s boys singing, dirty, ransacking their house for food and clothing, chanting He Kill My Ma, He Kill My Pa, I Vote For Him.