Liberia is a country on the western African coast that in recent
times has garnered headlines for the brutality of two
horror-dealing regimes holding sway over 25 years. It is a
country founded by American-born Africans, and as such, its history
is partly our own, yet it has been easy to turn away from the
headlines and leave Liberia out of our thoughts. Liberian-American
journalist Helene Cooper will change that with this book. Subtitled
"In Search of a Lost African Childhood," this chronicle is a saga
of personal victory over terror, sorrow and separation.

Elijah Johnson, ancestor of Cooper's mother, was a freeman who
fought for America in the War of 1812. Randolph Cooper was a free
man, ancestor of Cooper's father. Both were original settlers of
what became the independent nation of Liberia. They arrived in the
1820s, part of an initiative by highly placed American white men to
deal with the growing number of ex-slaves and their potential
influence in the newly founded, slavery-dependent nation. The
colonists were referred to as "the Congo People" by the local
tribespeople because they were presumed to be slavers like other
interlopers in the region.

With superior resources, the new arrivals quickly
became elite rulers of their coastal domain, with the result that
Helene Calista Esmeralda Esdolores Dennis Cooper was born in 1966
to a life of incredible luxury, her family free to travel to
America and England for education and business, retaining and
polishing their own haughty version of the English language. The
"Congo People" kept the locals (whom they called "Country People")
as servants, and rarely was there any social mixing. The family was
so affluent that they were able to hire a "sister" for Helene, a
local girl named Eunice. To the family's credit, Eunice was treated
like a near-equal with Helene, but her status as a Country Person
implied that she could never rise to their level.

The deep divide between the Congo People and the Country
People in Liberia was a recipe for disaster. The wound
festered until 1980, when a soldier, Samuel Doe, staged a
bloody coup. Helene, a young teen, watched in
shock as the previous government leaders, some of them members
of her family, were publicly executed near her palatial family
home at Sugar Beach. Not long afterwards, Doe's
guerrillas stormed that mansion. While Helene was locked in a
bedroom, her beloved Mommee was gang-raped. The house at Sugar
Beach became a venue for the regime's executions. Later, many
dismembered bodies were exhumed on the grounds of the once-proud
family home.

It is these memories that chased Helene as she immigrated to the
United States, living mostly with her father and various siblings
while Mommee stayed in Liberia collecting rents on family
properties and sending nearly every cent to the émigrés.
Her father, with no work skills and dogged by creditors, took
loving care of his daughters while Mommee footed the bill. In high
school, Helene found that she had a saving grace --- a gift for
writing. She attended Journalism School at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and wound up as a "wandering reporter" for
the Wall Street Journal. That meant traveling around the
Deep South questioning locals about seemingly trivial
business-related issues, while her lost Liberia burst into the
headlines again with word of a new coup staged by Charles
Taylor. Prince Johnson, a rival to Taylor, captured Samuel Doe
and drank a beer while overseeing his slow torture and death.
Mayhem again reigned in Helene's homeland.

By that time, Helene was a U.S. citizen, and most of her family
had settled in America. She had everything to gain by forgetting
her roots. But her childhood companion, Eunice, was still in
Liberia, and thereon hangs the completion of Helene Cooper's inner
journey, one last trip to the house at Sugar Beach.

THE HOUSE AT SUGAR BEACH is a journalistic account that informs
and provokes, yet often reads like a novel. It is personal, painful
and true. Readers will want to know more about the subject matter
and will be looking for Helene Cooper's next book.