City Hotel in Rain, Writing Great American Novel

Personal Journal: Saturday, July 23, 1977

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone

Today in a pouring afternoon rain I took a long aimless walk around the nation’s capital. I saw two men fight over a 10-cent Bic pen. And I saw a hell of a lot of poor people. 

I wasn’t moved to sympathy. It’s just something that is.

I didn’t make value judgments. I just watched.
Walking, wearing my army surplus rain poncho I ate in an Indian restaurant. I saw Lebanese merchants standing outside their storefronts. All afternoon I wandered the alleys of a city full of tin-shack buildings where the monsoon rain falls off roofs and down the street carrying away banana peels. There was water everywhere, in the streets, on the windshields, falling into gutters and roaring out to sea with a tidal onslaught of fish bones, human piss and corncobs.

I felt alone.

And I endured that too.
 I saw karate movie advertisements on the sides of store walls and an African man wearing a Kentucky Fliers basketball shirt. I saw a Lebanese girl wearing braces and a kid wearing a Pepsi T-shirt.

I saw a city striving to be new, but hampered by the leftovers of its past. Here is the city that became home to slaves liberated by the British, slaves from everwhere returned  to their native Africa. Freetown, where it rains 144 inches in six months, the capital of an entire nation with a one-room museum.

It's better, though, than the bush, upcountry where I live. I had to come see at least this pretense of civilization.
 I write this, sitting on the balcony of the City Hotel. Here, the English novelist Graham Greene set parts of his “The Heart of the Matter,” a great melancholy novel about WWII in colonial Sierra Leone. A German sailor, who is so often here, sits to my right with his head on the table. 

A Peace Corps volunteer, visiting from Liberia, just wandered upstairs from the bar and asked  if I’m keeping a journal.

“No,” I said.
“I’m writing the Great American Peace Corps Novel.”

“Isn’t everybody?” he said.