Behind the backseat, pressed against the white-stockinged knees of the maids, the Prime Minister crouches under a blanket.

A Peugeot and a Fiat are waiting down the street to file in behind the station wagon. All three cars head east, out of the city. After they’ve crossed the Kwango River by ferryboat, the Prime Minister rises from the backseat, stretches his long, narrow frame, and joins his wife, Pauline, and small son, Roland, in a car belonging to the Guinean embassy. It proceeds alone, east toward Stanleyville, where loyal crowds wait to hail their chief, believing with all their hearts that he’ll restore their dreams of a free Congo.

But the roads are terrible. The same delicious mud that’s salvation to manioc is the Waterloo of an automobile. They inch forward through the night, until dawn, when Lumumba’s party is halted by a flat tire. He paces on the flattened grass by the ditch, remaining remarkably clean, while the driver labors to change the tire. But the effort stirs the black, wet road to a mire, and when he starts up the car again, it won’t move. Lumumba kneels in the mud to add the force of his own shoulder to the back bumper. It’s no use; they’re hopelessly bogged down. They’ll have to wait for help. Still exuberant with freedom, they remain confident. Two of Lumumba’s former cabinet members are behind them, coming from Leopoldville in another car.

But there has been bad luck. Those two men have reached the Kwango River and are gesturing helplessly at an astonished fisherman. They want him to go wake the ferryman. The ferry squats low in the water at the opposite shore, where it left off Lumumba’s party the  night before. These  fugitive  dignitaries  are  both  from  the Batetela tribe and learned French in mission schools, but have no inkling of how to talk to the Kwango tribesmen who fish the rivers east of Leopoldville. It never mattered before; prior to Independence, hardly anyone gave a thought to the large idea of a geographical Congo. But now, on the morning of November 28, it means everything. The river is not so wide. They can plainly see the ferry, and point to it. But the fisherman stares at these men’s city suits, their clean hands, and their mouths, which exaggerate incomprehensible syllables. He can see they’re desperate. He offers fish. This is how things go.

Lumumba’s party waited most of the day, until they were found and rescued by  a  regional   commissioner, who  took  them to Bulungu. There they paused, since Lumumba’s wife and son were hungry and needed to eat. While he waited in the shade of a tree, brushing dried mud from his trousers, the Prime Minister was recognized by a villager and pulled into what quickly became an excited crowd. He gave an impromptu speech about the unquenchable African thirst for liberty. Somewhere deep in that crowd was a South African mercenary pilot who owned a radio. Very shortly, the CIA station chief knew Lumumba was free. All across the Congo on invisible radio waves flew the code words: The Rabbit has escaped. The army recaptured Lumumba less than fifty miles from our village. People flocked to the roads, banging with sticks and fetishes on the hoods of the army convoy that took him away. The event was reported quickly with drums, across our province and beyond, and some of our neighbors even ran there on foot to try to help their captured leader. But in the midst of all that thunder, all that news assaulting our ears, we heard not a word. Lumumba was taken to Thysville prison, then flown to Katanga Province, and finally beaten so savagely they couldn’t return the body to his widow without international embarrassment.

Pauline and her children grieved, but having no body to bury properly is a terrible thing for a Congolese family. A body unmourned can’t rest. It flies around at night. Pauline went to bed those nights begging her husband not to gnaw with his beak at the living. That’s what I believe, anyway. I think she would have pled with him not to steal the souls of those who would take his place. Despite her prayers, the Congo was left in the hands of soulless, empty men.

Fifteen years after it all happened, I sat by my radio in Atlanta listening to Senator Church and the special committee hearings on the Congo. I dug my nails into my palms till I’d pierced my own flesh. “Where had I been? Somewhere else entirely? Of the coup, in August, I’m sure we’d understood nothing. From the next five months of Lumumba’s imprisonment, escape, and recapture, I recall—what? The hardships of washing and cooking in a drought. A humiliating event in the church, and rising contentions in the village. Ruth May’s illness, of course. And a shocking scrap with Leah, who wanted to go hunting with the men. I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn’t cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of good-will adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.