The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood
SynopsisPlot
Helene Cooper is “Congo,” a descendant of two Liberian dynasties—traced back to the first ship of freemen that set sail from New York in 1820 to found Monrovia. Helene grew up at Sugar Beach, a twenty-two-room mansion by the sea. Her childhood was filled with servants, flashy cars, a villa in Spain, and a farmhouse up-country. It was also an African childhood, filled with knock foot games and hot pepper soup, heartmen and neegee. When Helene was eight, the Coopers took in a foster child—a common custom among the Liberian elite. Eunice, a Bassa girl, suddenly became known as “Mrs. Cooper’s daughter.”
Story
About this book
Helene Cooper's memoir traces her early life in Liberia, where she grew up among the Congo elite, descendants of freed African Americans who sailed from New York in 1820 to found what became Monrovia. Her family lived at Sugar Beach, a twenty-two-room house near the ocean, with servants, expensive cars, a villa in Spain, and a farm up-country.
It was also an African childhood of knock foot games and hot pepper soup, and of stories about heartmen and neegee. When Helene was eight, the Coopers took in a foster child, Eunice, a Bassa girl, following a custom among the Liberian elite, and she became known as Mrs. Cooper's daughter. The two girls grew up side by side across a social divide that ran through the whole country.
The 1980 military coup ended the long political dominance of the settler descendants, and Cooper sets out the violence that followed and how it separated her family from the country and from Eunice. Working later as a journalist, she returns to Liberia in search of the people and places she left behind. The book was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.
