The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir

While the story has only one “giant,” Moore’s tall, brave father, Gus, several “women” are key to her upbringing and survival: Ol’ Ma, Mam, and Satta. Ol’ Ma, Moore’s grandmother, stays with Gus and her granddaughters, aiding him in their protection and care. Like Mam, Ol’ Ma is independent and seems to have an egalitarian union with her husband, Charles Freeman (Ol’ Pa) up until his death. When Mam meets Jallah, he’s surprised that Ol’ Pa has only one wife. His conversion to Islam to marry Ol’ Ma strongly reveals his dedication to her and his understanding that he must embrace this key aspect of his future wife’s identity to be worthy of her, instead of expecting her to conform to him. This means that, unlike many men, Ol’ Pa respects his wife’s faith as part of her distinct identity.

Part of Moore’s motivation for telling her story is to underscore the unconventional relationships between her parents and her grandparents. Gus stays home caring for his daughters while Mam is in New York working on a master’s degree. This decision causes some gossip within their community in Caldwell among those who don’t understand how Mam could leave her three daughters behind for any period—or the purpose of her ambition when her husband made a good salary.

Mam and Satta rescue the Moores. Wayetu’s story undoes the conventional expectation that men be the protectors of their families. Mam’s bravery and insistence on getting her family out of Liberia place her on par with other heroes, particularly in the context of Wayetu’s fairy-tale allegories. If Liberia is an enchanted kingdom that harbors dragons, Mam enters the kingdom to rescue her family from their fire. Though her resources are limited, Mam’s success is proof that optimism, determination, and love can sometimes matter more than money, power, and connections.

In telling the story of her family’s rescue, Moore examines a more complex sense of fealty. Satta aligns with Charles Taylor’s army, which makes her partly responsible for the bloodshed that overwhelms the country. On the other hand, she is one of many rebel women, including one named B (with whom Moore later speaks) who has chosen to counter the evil acts she’s forced to perform with the good one of lying to the rebels to rescue civilians. As Jallah explains to Mam, Satta may have joined the army to gain protection for her family and to earn money. While her motivations for rescuing civilians are not entirely altruistic either, as she does so only in exchange for a fee, the danger of being killed underscores her sacrifice and risk. Like Mam, who uses what little power her student visa gives her to rescue Gus and the girls, Satta uses what little power she has as a rebel to ferry civilians to safety. This illustrates that no one is completely good or bad. When they feel trapped and lack options, people often commit to actions for the greater good that might otherwise be deemed bad.

Moore tells her therapist that her most traumatic memory is not of her experience of war in Liberia but of an event in Spring, Texas during her childhood when she, her sister, and their friends were chased out of a corner store. The cashiers threatening to call the police and chasing the girls out of the store with a baseball bat illustrates that while children in Liberia were unsafe and often beaten, killed, or conscripted into Charles Taylor’s army, Black children could be just as unsafe in the US. As Moore mentions, the experience proved that “dragons” were everywhere.

In addition to the virulent racism that Moore experienced in Texas, she notes the subtler reminders, the microaggressions that occur in the office and on the street, such as when she walks hand-in-hand with her white boyfriend, Johnny Boy, down the streets of Brooklyn. The dichotomy of living in a gentrifying community that deems itself progressive but also finds interracial relationships shocking is a difficult reality for Moore to reconcile. It highlights the hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of many so-called liberal white people, as does Moore’s exchange with Johnny Boy when he enters Moore’s apartment while she’s washing her hair: Figuring that her time with her hair will take away the opportunity to go out to dinner, he casually asks if she wishes she had hair like his. When she takes offense, he dismisses his question as a joke, not registering why it offends her. The claim that one was making a joke—even one in poor taste—after someone registers offense, is a way to deflect responsibility. Johnny Boy doesn’t want to be perceived as someone who may have absorbed racist ideas, as this would seem incongruous with his empathy for Black people killed in instances of police brutality. His comment reveals the insidiousness of racism and white supremacy and the vigilance necessary to examine subtle biases.

Similarly, many Black people whom Moore encounters internalize racism, which registers as colorism. She mentions men she has dated who claim that she’s the first dark-skinned woman they’ve ever dated. She mentions, too, her conversations with other Black women who are praised for looking “mixed,” for having thinner noses, or for having eyes that are not dark brown. These anecdotes reveal how many Black people have come to believe, after centuries of conditioning, that Eurocentric beauty standards are more desirable. Such conditioning encourages Black women to see themselves as undesirable—a fact that opinion articles—like the one that a friend shares with Moore—sometimes reiterate literally.

When Mam arrives in New York in the early-1990s, she too notices how white strangers barely look at her and thinks about how different this is from the ease with which other Liberians meet her gaze back home. She also notices how, when she goes to restaurants with white friends, the servers will address her friends before speaking to her, if they do at all.

Moore focuses the memoir on her experiences of racism, as well as those of Mam, Wi, and her friends to give central importance to how Black women experience forms of racial discrimination and ostracism. Public narratives often de-emphasize these experiences, instead focusing on Black men as the primary recipients of racial violence and hostility. However, Black women experience both racism and sexism as feeling compelled to live up to Eurocentric beauty standards and, most tragically, being conditioned to think that they’re unlovable when they can’t conform to those standards.