Love in the Driest Season

Against All Odds; In Africa, A Reporter Discovers Much More Than A Story.

Reviewed by Adam Fifield - February 15, 2004 Sunday

While a reporter for the Detroit Free Press in the 1990s, Neely Tucker chronicled some of the world's grimmest conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Rwanda, among many other places. Like other foreign correspondents with a reserved front-row seat to mayhem, Tucker paid an emotional price. "The steady stream of violence had worn away my natural sense of compassion to the point where I could cover almost any horror but felt very little about anything at all," he writes in his memoir, Love in the Driest Season.

In 1997, Tucker, a white native of Mississippi, and his wife, Vita, an African-American woman from Detroit, relocated to yet another bleak place. Zimbabwe was ravaged by AIDS and overwhelmed by a growing deluge of orphaned children. In the capital city of Harare, their new home, the Tuckers volunteered at Chinyaradzo Children's Home, an orphanage where infants were dying with appalling regularity from diarrhea and dehydration. AIDS, though also a likely culprit, was rarely mentioned.

One of the children at Chinyaradzo was a gravely sick infant girl named Chipo. (The name means "gift" in Shona.) Abandoned in a field of tall grass, covered by ants, the child was miraculously discovered by passersby. When Tucker picked her up one day, she clasped his finger with her tiny hand. This simplest of gestures sparked an emotional reawakening for the veteran journalist and goes to the heart of this potent and stirring new memoir.

Tucker's writing is taut and vivid as he narrates his and his wife's tumultuous quest to adopt Chipo. The stakes were enormously high: A doctor told the Tuckers, who were allowed to care for the infant temporarily, that if she were returned to the orphanage, she would almost certainly die.

In a postcolonial country sinking into social and economic despair, where an unspoken rule dictated that foreigners couldn't adopt Zimbabwean children and where President Robert Mugabe was stoking a virulent xenophobia, the Tuckers' task became Sisyphean. Chief among the obstacles was a maddening child-welfare system that seemed bent on thwarting them at every turn. Caseworkers evaded them. Their files were intentionally lost. They were accused of bribery. As a testament to Tucker's skillful pacing, this tale of negotiating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, which could have descended into somnolent tedium, reads instead like high drama with a dose of Grisham-style suspense.

This book is billed as "A Family Memoir," but it is a cross between a foreign correspondent's dispatches and a family tale. Nor is Love in the Driest Season etched with the literary filigree that marks other books in the genre. But that does not diminish its importance and certainly not its readability. Ultimately it is the story of the evolution of a mother and father, whose determination to save a doomed child makes that child theirs.

We learn that Tucker's and Vita's lives had been shaped in one way or another by racism. "I had been raised in the heart of the most racist state in America, and as a child, I had accepted the perverse as normal," Tucker writes. Vita's father had escaped the Jim Crow south of Alabama to move to the industrial north. Their experiences helped them to understand the brutal legacy of white rule in Zimbabwe -- the country won independence in 1980 -- but not to get beyond being branded as foreigners.

Soon after the Tuckers began caring for Chipo, Neely Tucker was sent on assignment to cover an uprising in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His dispatches from there and other trouble spots around Africa, interspersed throughout the narrative, form a nightmarish tableau. A description of families trying to find their relatives at a Nairobi morgue, after the bombing of the U.S. embassy there in 1998, is particularly haunting.

Tucker, now a reporter for The Washington Post, captures the horror of such episodes, as well as the growing tension between the requirements of his job and his new role as a father. "I found myself trying to say, again and again, that I would not have traveled if I had known she had been so desperately ill, but it seemed flat and defensive, if not just a lie; who was I kidding? Vita knew better than anyone that my job defined my life. It wasn't a paycheck. It was all of me, a careening mixture of energy, creativity and curiosity. It was my drug." After freedom fighter-turned-strongman Robert Mugabe ordered a crackdown on journalists and Tucker realized that his status as the only American staff correspondent in Zimbabwe could jeopardize the adoption, the obsessive reporter had to make a choice: keep his job or save his daughter. His decision is reflected in the chapter title "Choosing Chipo," but one suspects it wasn't that hard for him to make. There is, however, clearly a sense that Tucker reached a turning point, shedding an old mantle and emerging a new man. Finally, the Tuckers found an advocate, and ultimately they prevailed in their attempts to keep Chipo -- just days before a political crisis engulfed the country.

For all the virtues of Tucker's lean narrative, I felt there were a few places he could have lingered longer. We are told that Chipo precipitates a "family rapprochement" between Tucker and his estranged parents, who boycotted his wedding because of their own prejudice; although striking, the episode is far too brief. We don't have enough explanation of how, as he declares, "race, the defining issue of life in Mississippi, suddenly became a minor thing." Such quibbles aside, Tucker has written an extraordinary book of immense feeling and significant social relevance. Love in the Driest Season challenges anyone -- even those numbed by the world's abundant cruelty -- not to care.

- Adam Fifield is a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of A Blessing Over Ashes: The Remarkable Odyssey of my Unlikely Brother.