The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayetu Moore (2020) is an account of Moore’s growing up in Liberia during its first civil war (1989-1997), escaping, and building a new life in the United States. Moore was born in Liberia and raised in Spring, Texas. She graduated from Howard University. Moore also has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern California and a Master’s in anthropology and education from Columbia University on a Margaret Mead Fellowship. Moore débuted with her novel She Would Be King (2018), in which she tells the story of Liberia’s creation in the magical-realist tradition. Moore has published works in the Atlantic, Guernica, and other publications.

Note: This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Summary

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women begins on an April day in Caldwell, Liberia. It is Wayetu Moore’s fifth birthday. She’s at home with her father, her siblings, her grandparents, and the family’s domestic servant, Torma. Her father, Gus, talks with family friends about the First Liberian Civil War. The war stays distant from them, so Gus dismisses his friends’ concern that the rebels may soon approach, though his missionary neighbors from China soon leave out of fear of danger. Mam, Gus’s wife and the children’s mother, is away in the US. Wayetu longs for her mother and wonders if Mam thinks of her often too.

One day, a neighbor bangs on the door at the Moore home, warning them that the rebels are approaching. The family flees at once to the forest. They make their way to Elizabeth Tubman Memorial Institute (ETMI), a school in Monrovia where many Liberians seek shelter. However, they leave ETMI because Ol’ Ma suspects that soldiers—or rebels disguised as soldiers—are kidnapping young girls after a mother wakes to find that her own daughter is missing. They trek through the country, sleeping in abandoned homes during the day and walking by night. When Wayetu sees corpses in the street—the result of the rebels’ shooting rampages—her father tells her that they’re merely sleeping. At one supposedly abandoned house, they find another family hiding out. They’ve lost the eldest of their sons to the rebels: He joined the rebel army to save his mother from rape by those who broke into their home while his father was away.

Ol’ Ma thinks they ought to travel to Lai—the hometown of the Vai people. They make it across the border to Junde despite having to cross three checkpoints—including one where rebels nearly kill Gus—and take a canoe to the small village. For a while, their lives are peaceful. Though Wayetu’s younger sister, K, has a bout of malaria and the family never gets used to the steady diet of fish from Lake Piso, they feel safe. The girls receive daily lessons in the Vai language and arithmetic from their father and learn sewing from their grandmother. One day, Ol’ Pa, who was hiding in the village before Ol’ Ma and the Moores came, takes a canoe to Burma, which offers more supplies than Junde. Unfortunately, rebels intercept and kill him. Soon after this, a young female rebel soldier arrives and tells Gus that Mam has arrived to take him and the girls away.

The narrative then shifts to Wayetu’s current life in Brooklyn, New York, where she works as a freelance writer and consultant. She’s recovering from the end of a two-year relationship and sees a therapist who prompts her to explore her history of loss. In doing so, Wayetu thinks less about her war experiences in Liberia and more about her years as a refugee in Stratford, Connecticut, where she spent her early childhood, and Spring, Texas, where she lived from age eight until she started college. She recalls her early experiences with racism and colorism. She also thinks about the isolation she felt due to being African and how, from childhood, she’s had recurring dreams about Satta—the young woman who rescued her, her father, and her sisters. While speaking to her mother one day, she announces that she plans to return to Liberia.

Back in Monrovia, Gus and Mam have resumed their lives teaching at their alma mater, the University of Liberia. Wayetu spends her time talking with former rebels, some of whom she meets through her acquaintance Agnes. However, Wayetu is unable to find Satta. Finally, Wayetu asks her mother why she left the family in Liberia. Here, Moore makes her mother the narrator of her own story.

Mam tells of how, as civil war breaks out in Liberia, she’s living in New York and attending graduate school at Columbia University. She briefly visits home during Christmas break in 1989 and, upon returning to New York, discovers that she’s pregnant. She gives birth there, without Gus, and then decides to return to Liberia to help her family escape from the war. She uses her student visa to help get her husband and children out. Shortly after arriving in Freetown, Sierra Leone, she boards a bus to Bo Waterside. While on the bus, she meets a merchant named Jallah. During a casual conversation on the bus, he tells Mam of rebels willing to help people rescue their families in exchange for a fee. Mam decides to enlist the help of a young rebel named Satta. Anticipating that Gus will be suspicious, Mam gives Satta a photo of his new son, Augustus Moore, Jr., to help convince him that it’s not a ruse.

Satta goes to Lai, where Gus and his daughters are hiding, and tells him that Mam has come to take them back home. He’s incredulous until Satta shows him the photo. Overjoyed to have a baby son, Gus goes with Satta, who transports the family via canoe and bus to the border. She vouches for the family at checkpoints and allays any suspicions. The family is thrilled to be reunited. Alas, after Satta successfully gets them across the border, she returns at once to Liberia, disappearing from the Moores’s lives forever.

However, Moore is still in thrall of the young, courageous woman who saved her family’s life—a woman she never had the honor of knowing. She is also in thrall of her mother’s immense strength. She ends by noting that many people have stories of surviving war, and not all of them are bad. Hers is one such story.