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• About The House at Sugar Beach
• "Author's journey back to Liberia was a long one"
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The House at Sugar Beach author tells Tavis about the epiphany that led to the search for her long-lost sister in Liberia. (3:27)
 

Full interview. (12:22)
 

Tavis: Helene Cooper is the diplomatic correspondent for "The New York Times" who previously served as a reporter and foreign correspondent for "The Wall Street Journal." Her latest book focuses on her family roots in Liberia and is called "The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood." Helene Cooper, an honor to have you on the program.

Helene Cooper: Thanks for having me.

Tavis: I don't know where to start this conversation because there's so much in the text. Let me start with a strange question, but you're a reporter, so you can handle this. In discussing the book, what do you think is the central starting point to understanding your story? Where would you start if you were sitting in my chair?

Cooper: I had this problem when I was trying to write the book. That's why it took me four years, and I ended up doing it very chronologically. But I think I would start first with just Liberia was founded, as you know, by freed Blacks. My great-great-great-great - four greats - grandfather, Elijah Johnson, was on the first ship that sailed from New York in 1820 and they ended up on the west coast of Africa. It wasn't Liberia at the time.

And these Blacks forged a new country - they were incredibly courageous - but they also set up the same kind of antebellum society that they had run away from in the South, and they ended up establishing themselves as the elite, and the native Africans, which sort of made up the rest of the population, were the farmers and the tenants.

And so there was this very two - there was a two-class structure in Liberia that went on for 150 years, and so I had a lot of - when I was working on the book I was sort of born into this - I was born as a little Liberian princess, if you will, and lived a very sheltered life at our house at Sugar Beach. And all of this upended in 1980 when there was a military coup in Liberia and this whole system was overthrown.

My family was attacked, and we ran away. When we ran away, we ended up leaving my adopted sister, Eunice, who was a native Liberian who my parents had adopted, to sort of play with me. We were raised together as sisters, although we always sort of knew that we were different.

And so my book is about my decision, finally, after 23 years in the United States, to go back to try to find her.

Tavis: Thank you for answering that. (Laughter)

Cooper: That was a long-winded - that was the longest-winded answer ever, I know.

Tavis: No, that was a brilliant answer. (Laughter) I'm just laughing. This is a talk show host - this is a wonderful dream for a talk show host. You ask one question, you get more than you asked for. But now that you've given me a good idea about where to start, I got this now, I can take this. I can take this from here. (Laughter) But I want to thank you for that assist.

But now that I know where to go, I want to go back now to Elijah. What do you know about Mr. Elijah that convinced him to get on that boat to leave New York to go found what is now Liberia?

Cooper: That is such - that's a great question. I was so - I was raised - my mother used to talk when I was a kid about Elijah Johnson. We were taught about him in school because he was sort of one of the founders of Monrovia, he stood up against the British and didn't let them put an English flag. And we heard so much about him, but it's your parents so you don't really believe that he really existed.

And when I finally started working on the book and I found a journal that he kept while he was on the ship going to Africa in 1820 - he had been born free. He hadn't been a slave, but he had fought against the British in the war of 1812, and everything I read in the journal sort of led me to believe that he just wanted his own home and he wanted to be master of his own destiny.

There's this great line that just blew me away when I found it in the journal. It said that he kept - it was like the second week that they were at sea, and he said, "Today while we were up on deck, John Fisher whipped his wife. I think this is a very dull lamp for me to carry with me into a dark continent, but I've not lost faith in my god."

And I read that and I thought he sounds so cool. I feel so enormously proud of him, but at the same time there is a little bit of ambivalence as well, and there's a lot of conflict because it's sort of really ironic that these guys got there and sort of - there were fights between the native Africans and the freed Blacks over slavery, because slave trade was still going on at the time.

The native Africans were still engaging in slave trade, which the Blacks abolished when they got there, and there was a lot. But it was the root of the economy, so there was a lot of tension and it wasn't that easy for them. But that said, there wasn't that - it seems as if there was this belief among the freed Blacks that they were coming as the civilized people to convert the heathen Africans to civilization; this assumption of superiority.

Tavis: Somehow in this process, then, Helene, to your point, somehow in the process your family ends up on the right side of the track, as it were, in terms of economics, at least. How does that happen?

So they go there as free Black people - I got this. How do they make the money, how do they end up being part of this bourgeois establishment in Liberia?

Cooper: Most of them were literate; they could read and write. So they already had a jump on the rest of the population, and they emulated a lot of the American cultures that they had left. There was a lot of fishing, they set up farms, they started these - Liberia has an enormous amount of natural resources - iron ore and that sort of thing, and they basically built up the country that way, to the point that by the time I was born - and I won't say the year, it was a very long time ago - we were really well established.

And my father, when I was seven, built this 22-room mansion on the Atlantic Ocean, 11 miles outside of Monrovia. And that was our house at Sugar Beach.

Tavis: Sugar Beach, yeah. What do you recall, then, about that childhood? Beyond that big house, what do you recall about the way you were treated as opposed to the way others were treated in your society? What do you recall about being this - as you put it, this little Black princess in Liberia?

Cooper: It seemed perfectly normal to me at the time because I didn't know anything different. It was perfectly normal that I would be treated as whatever, and everybody - it was perfectly normal that we were rich and everybody else was poor.

I went to a private school, we had a house in Spain that we would go to vacation every year, and that, I just thought, was how things were. I was so sheltered and so naïve that I didn't even cast my mind to look at just sort of what was around me, because when you're born in something, you don't start - I was 13 by the time the coup happened, and I think at that point I had started to question. But as a little girl, it seemed that's the way - I thought that's the way things are.

Tavis: So at 13, this coup takes place. And this is where the book really gets - I'm trying to find the right word - gets tough; it gets tough. And I've read that you had a difficulty writing this particular part of your life. Editors tried to push you into writing about this because it is - and I think the editors were right here - I know it was tough to get out.

But it's so central to the story, so I'll let you tell it. When the riot happens, as is always the case or typically the case, those persons who have are targeted by those who have not, so that your family was targeted because you had a whole lot at Sugar Beach.

You get targeted, they come into your house, and I'll let you tell me then what happens next.

Cooper: Well, the soldiers came to our house a couple of days after the military coup, and they attacked my mother. Basically, they wanted to take me and my sister, and my mother sacrificed herself for us and traded herself for us so - and they took her town in the basement and she was forcibly attacked.

That night they left and my mother was - she came back upstairs. We had been locked up in the bedroom, and she came back upstairs and she took out a pistol. And I still remember, because she gave me and my sisters a Valium tranquilizer afterwards, and I'd never had one before.

I remember my sister Eunice and I lying on the floor in the bedroom and my younger sister on the bed, and my mother sitting in the loveseat, waiting, with a pistol in her hand, cocked at the door, waiting for the soldiers to come back.

They did come back, but they didn't - they ended up not coming back into the house. They came into the yard, and the next morning we ran away and we went into town to stay with family members. But a week after that, my uncle was executed on the beach by firing squad, my father was shot - he'd been up at the farm during the time of the attack.

And a couple of weeks later we ran away, and that's when we left. And I went in the space of two months from the little rich girl to being the suspicious new African refugee at my new high school in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Tavis: So you guys go first to Tennessee, then later to North Carolina, and I'm just picking piece of the book because it's a wonderful story - it's told wonderfully.

The part of the book that, again, is challenging I think for readers is how your family made a decision to leave Eunice behind. So they had adopted Eunice for you to have a playmate, but then when you guys end up having to hightail it out of the country, Eunice gets left behind. That happens how?

Cooper: I for the longest time thought we just left her. I found out later, after interviewing so many of my family members, that my mother actually asked Eunice to come with us, and Eunice said no and decided that she wanted to stay.

She didn't want to leave her mother, who she still saw. Her mom used to come and visit her at our house all the time; we used to take Eunice to visit her mom. And she wanted to finish her - she was a senior in high school, and she wanted to finish her senior year.

And we kind of thought - as I was saying goodbye at the airport, it was inconceivable to me that we weren't going to see each other again. I thought for sure that in a few months, after she graduated from high school, she would come and join us and slowly things would sort of right itself, or maybe we would end up going back to Liberia.

At the time when you're in the moment, you don't know what's happening, and I think that was part of it, too. My parents did ask her to come with us, and she said no. But they didn't push the issue, and I think actually that's also one of the things that I sort of struggled with for years - this feeling that we had abandoned her.

Tavis: I got a minute and 30 seconds to go. We are not - follow my lead on this; I'm going to sell some books for you. We're not going to give away what happens at the end.

Cooper: Please - yeah.

Tavis: All right. That said, though, tell me what does happen - and obviously, things work out for you to the extent that you go to Tennessee, you end up going to North Carolina, you end up obviously getting a good education, you end up writing for "The Wall Street Journal," you end up writing for "The New York Times," and somewhere along the way you decide - something happens that makes you decide "I've got to start digging into this story, whatever happened to Eunice?" But what was that thing that happened that made you - this epiphany that I've got to go searching?

Cooper: And it sounds so corny that there really was an epiphany. I had spent years remaking myself into an American journalist and ignoring Liberia and ignoring all the horrible things that were coming out of Liberia and the civil war and the child soldiers. And I felt as if, if I shut it off, then it couldn't hurt me anymore.

And I was in Iraq, embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division in 2003 for the Iraq war, and my Humvee was run over by a tank. I was pulled out and I came very close to very serious injury, and I'm lying on my back in the desert and they're screaming "Medevac, medevac, she's bleeding out, she's bleeding out." And at that moment, I thought this is a stupid place to die; this is a stupid war to die in. If I'm going to die in a war, I should die in a war in my own country.

Tavis: So your life flashes in front of your eyes, and you decide then you're going to go in search of Eunice.

Cooper: I knew that I had to go and find my sister.

Tavis: And that's where this conversation ends. And if you want to know what happens next, the book is called "The House at Sugar Beach," written - I know, that was wrong. I know people are cussing right now - "You wrong for that, Tavis! You wrong for that!" (Laughter)

Cooper: You're not wrong for that, Tavis - you're not wrong for that.

Tavis: (Laughs) That's where our conversation ends, but that's not where the book ends. It is a fascinating story about what Helene Cooper does after she has that epiphany - going in search of what happened to Eunice. Again, the book, "The House at Sugar Beach." Helene, nice to have you on the program. It's a wonderful book, and I'm glad you wrote it.

Cooper: Thank you so much.

Tavis: It's my pleasure.